Ten City Nation - Everyone's a Tourist [both taken from the 2008 album Ten City Nation - download it for absolutely free right here!]
Formed from the ashes of undeservedly forgotten agitpopstars Miss Black America, Ten City Nation have just released their blinding debut album for free on their website. Seven years on from the first album this lot ever put out as MBA (the underrated God Bless Miss Black America), they sound hungrier, more passionate and...just damn louder than ever before. Ten City Nation is truly a thing of beauty - tracks like 'Positive Sickness' show that singer Seymour Patrick's rage is alive and well, while 'The Air is on Fire' rocks out with a dusty atmosphere that makes it sound like a recording of a gunfight in some distant desert. That's a good thing, by the way.
'Exhibition Time Again' kicks the album off with speaker-blowing intensity, as hundering Queens of the Stone Age style drums jostle with detuned riffs played by sandpaper-raw guitars not heard since the last Shellac record. Meanwhile, 'Everyone's a Tourist' centres around a spiralling riff which tumbles into the most unashamedly anthemic chorus on the entire album, perfectly capturing the energy and vitriol that fuel their live shows. Both tracks should, in some parallel universe, but absolutely massive hits, but that would probably ruin it for anyone who hears them.
It's teen rock for grown-ups - there's shades of early Idlewild (or should that be iDLEWiLD?), Fugazi, mclusky, and even traces of Blur (try the beautifully discordant opening riff of 'Skeletons') - and, by all rights, deserves to change at least one lonely bedroom-bound teenager's life for the better. It's loud, melodic, passionate and everything that most bands these days aren't; Ten City Nation (both the band and the album) demands to be heard, and you'd be a fool to ignore it...and for the price you're paying for it, there's no excuse. As a wise man once said, "What happened to your urge to destroy?"
