The fantastic more-or-less-debut album from The Refreshments, released nationally in 1996. It is one of the most amazingly consistent, front-to-back awesome albums I've ever listened to. There are very few albums that can be played the whole way through for total strangers without skipping tracks. It's a party album; it's a road trip album, almost equal in stature to Full Moon Fever. It's the 1996 backlash to Nirvana and Pearl Jam's (well-deserved) millions made off of angst. It's got sad bits, but even in the sad songs, Buddy and Roger and Brian and P.H. are smiling, and just when your heart goes out to this poor bastard who lost his true love in a saloon in Tempe, he cracks a joke about impotence or a bar fight that he lost on purpose, just to get in the last word, and you'll giggle. It's rowdy rock and roll from just-barely-North of the Border, with some trumpets and some salsa and some tequila.
This album is about living in blue collar Arizona as much as Nine Inch Nails are about living in the Hell in your own head, as much as Tom Petty or The Beach Boys are about living in California, as much as Elvis was about Memphis and later Las Vegas. In one moment, it's about Vietnam, as my generation sees it: in a rear-view mirror cliche of drinking and camaraderie. In another, it's about falling in love and prostitutes and Mexico and being Carefree. Oh, and it's also about oral sex. A lot of oral sex. And how many other albums rhyme border guard with Jean-Luc Picard? Borrow it, listen to it, love it, buy it, bring it with you in the car. In that order.
las canciones:
- Blue Collar Suicide
- European Swallow
- Down Together
- Mekong
- Don't Wanna Know
- Girly
- Banditos
- Mexico
- Interstate
- Suckerpunch
- Carefree
- Nada
"Here comes another song about Mexico..."
--The Refreshments, Mexico, cancione ocho