‘No Guitars’ is, well, full of guitars. This single off Beyond the Pail, a 3-song EP from western Massachusetts-based veteran DIYers Bucket, fills the void when you need some Pavement but don’t have any available. What I can’t tell is whether it’s an accident that they sound so much like Pavement or a tribute to the legends. The vocal delivery could be mistaken for a long-lost Malkmus twin (if you doubt me, just check out Pavement’s ‘Harness Your Hopes’ for reference, especially at ‘time to shake the rations cuz someone’s gonna cash in’).
Although nobody can really fill Pavement’s shoes, this basement rockers’ single will pick a rhythm and inject a biting word or two into your heart and make you want to hear more of their tracks.
The chorus takes us right down to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid of needs and gives us an anthemic line questioning one’s general sense of safety and desires that, also of note, gets pleasantly stuck in your head: ‘What am I afraid of? / What do I want?’
The lyrics are a delicious feast of imagery combining finger-pointing and self-deprecation. ‘I gave you the stinkeye with my so-called charm’ leaves me chuckling to myself; this acerbic humor seems to be sorely missing in a lot of today’s indie rock. And how can we disagree with the brutally honest line, ‘There’s a lot of bad apples that shit and eat’?
I’ll be digging into their back catalog for sure!
Written by Greg Gobel
