Please adjust your clocks back to Eastern Standard Time — none of this Central Time horsecrap. That’s enough of that. You and I both know that Chattanooga rocks the EST, hovering right on the edge of what I like to call the International Dateline of the Midwest, which I thought of just now. You can climb to the top of Lookout Mountain and see a whole hour into the past, if I’m not mistaken.
Like clockwork, Mythical Motors, the Nooga power-pop project maintained and fronted by stalwart citizen Matt Addison, is celebrating an anniversary with the new self-released tangle of magnetic tape, The Life Stage. That’s right, those of you counting at home, this is Mythical Motors’s TENTH album of Nuggets-y nuggets, a milestone, a nice round number to celebrate with some of your closest friends at a fancy restaurant. I feel like I should get Mythical Motors a present or something — what’s an appropriate tin or aluminum gift for an indie rock band?
But Addison and crew would probably prefer beer and pizza to cocktail sausages and puff pastries, because they’re way too workmanlike in their day-to-day to stop for a second and swill sparkling wine. Here cranking out 26 lo-fi tunes like he’s Bob Pollard or something, Addison channels the ghosts of GBV and XTC, even though nobody’s dead from those bands (that I know of). Maybe Addison even dreams in Pollard-ese: song titles include “Her Liquid Awakening,” “Contract for Hallucinatory Living,” “Arrows for Blank Angles,” and “Spires of Luck for the Lookout King.” It’s like ol’ Bob is scratching at the walls of a sleeping Matt Addison’s unconscious brain.
The Life Stage is a fully appropriate mile marker on the blue-collar path of maintaining the glory days of musty dive bars and unruly, pogoing drunks. You might be sleep deprived and grumpy by the end of it, but that’s only because it kept you up all night singing along. And hey, we may be getting older, but let’s face it — we can still do this. We get up, we go to work, we come home, we go to bed. On the weekends, we rock the heck out. You can set your watch by that.
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