HIGH TENSION WIRES:
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Life’s full of “what ifs?” that you don’t think would come true, that you just toy with to make your day seem better. World peace through the betterment of music type shit, like what if Mike Wiebe of the Riverboat Gamblers fronted most of the Marked Men (Mark and Jeff) to be a supergroup? (And most supergroups aren’t that super: Damn Yankees? Travelling Wilburys? Very not so good.) The High Tension Wires, goodwill ambassadors to music lovers worldwide, fulfill one of my musical fantasies. The result? Sonic butter that melts down to a barbed wire center via the microwave-intense scene of Denton, Texas. Take the Undertones, The Buzzcocks, and The Jam (with those little, simple flourishes that break a song wide open while your fingers snap), put them in a hostile environment (a couple decades of Skoal-stained teeth threats and suburbs that were designed for suffocation of any sort of difference), light a couple of Scared of Chaka bottlerockets into the mix, steal the hubcaps, blow a radiator hose driving through Tucson, and there you go: ten songs, a little over eighteen glorious minutes, no fuckin’ around. –Todd Taylor (Dirtnap)