- Son of a Gun
Valentine’s Day is Friday, but even if hokey lovey-dovey cliches about romance aren’t your thing, there’s still fun to be had this week. Just take a look at the concert calendar.
“Garrett Luczak of Chicago band Son of a Gun seems to have figured out how to get around that eternal conundrum ‘Ars longa, vita brevis,’” writes Brian Costello. “It’s the same solution arrived at by your Reatards, Dwyers, and Segalls: get your songs recorded on that four-track now, don’t worry whether they’re ‘finished’ just yet, and then find the band to play them. Using this approach, Luczak has been admirably prolific—in just 18 months he’s amassed a Bandcamp treasure trove that includes five EPs, a couple cassette splits, worthwhile covers of the Count Five and Wire, and some other odds and sods. Overall the music provides what people tend to want from garage rock when they’re in the mood for garage rock—something raw and immediate that you can drink shitty beer to—but dig into the inspired maelstrom of frenzied four-chord stomping and well-timed cathartic howling, and you’ll find an upward trajectory to the quality of the songwriting over time.”
