Charlie Don’t Shake Is America

Charlie Don’t Shake – “The Ballad of Pat Brown”
(from America Is Our Office)

!Aaaaand, we’re back. Did you miss us? Oh, what’s that, you didn’t even realize we were gone? You’ve been too busy downloading the latest Santogold remixes, watching yet more video clips of the same few Robyn tunes, and telling all your friends how you were way into No Age before Pitchfork ruined everything with a debatable ‘Best New Music’ label? That’s cool, man, we’ve been doing, uhm, the same thing, I guess.

Aw, who the hell am I kidding? We’ve been out of touch. Between day jobs, relocations, personal responsibilities, and freelance hand modeling gigs in Thailand, it’s not always easy, or worthwhile, to keep up with the mercurial tastes of the interweb’s tastemakers. Sometimes you just want comfort music –good, all-American rock & roll that you can blast out your open car windows without having to worry whether or not a skuzzy, two-chord guitar riff meets a predetermined hipster quotient. This is where Charlie Don’t Shake enters the picture.

Charlie Don’t Shake is kind of like the missing link of your record collection, somehow managing to make sardonic folk and blue-eyed soul feel like brother and sister, while peddling distorted Britrock and story-driven Americana as conjoined twins, rather than genres divided by an ocean. Charlie Don’t Shake is quite possibly the Best Band You’ve Never Heard, and I’m not saying that just to lord over you a woefully obscure band. I’m informing you because sometimes the world just isn’t fair.

Full disclosure: I know the guys in Charlie Don’t Shake well. My old band even gets name checked in the deliciously funky number “Dance Party” on last year’s America Is Our Office EP (imagine a cross between of Montreal and Young MC – yes, that kind of funk). Does that mean I shouldn’t write about them? Let me put it to you this way: If you were close personal friends with Keith Richards, would you stop telling people you loved the Stones?

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself here. After all, I’m only sharing “The Ballad of Pat Brown” with you, one of their most straightforward rock songs. But the way I see it, “Pat Brown” has everything you need in a two-and-a-half minute pop rock song, and nothing you don’t. And that’s exactly what I want this time of year. Jeremy Whitwam, a devout acolyte of the “If it’s more than two chords; it’s jazz” school of thought, pummels through power chords, adding playful stabs on the backbeat, while Craig Schmidt dryly whips up a drinker’s eulogy, only breaking his rhyme scheme to offer, “Here’s some lyrics / I hope they make / you sigh.” I sigh every time.

The obvious reference point here is Weezer. But while “Pork & Beans” spilled onto teh internets a couple weeks ago as a promising, but ultimately unmemorable mess (honestly, no cheating, can you remember a lick of that tune?), “The Ballad of Pat Brown” taps into what made me love clever ‘90s college radio rock in the first place. It makes me want to get together with my closest friends, drink disgustingly cheap malt liquor, and sing along to the high parts. And who could ask for anything more from their rock & roll?

Head on over to Charlie’s home page to download a few other tracks, and then go to their MySpace to stream a few more tunes.

-Posted by Todd