Them Hounds
The Heart Attack EP
(Self-released)
C+
The pieces are all there. Oklahoma City’s Them Hounds have the elements of a rock band the masses would eat up, an heir to the sound exhumed by Jack White and The Black Keys that has teetered on the edge of life support since the ’80s. Vocalist Erin Ames is a demanding presence with chops up there with the best of them, at ease swaying from guarded, at-arms-length crooning to leather-wrapped gymnastic runs that fire up like KISS pyrotechnics. Guitar solos sling and ricochet like a neon-lit pinball game and the rhythm section rears through rollicking hooks that are all too easy to submit your body to. They have the look, know what they want to do, and they do it right.
True to form, the material on the band’s new EP inoffensively satisfies every checkmark on the list. Them Hounds are craftsmen building a very sturdy house; it just so happens to look like hundreds that came before it. “Matches and Gasoline” might, technically, be a new entry into the blues-rock conversation, but it’s so archetypal that you anticipate where each note will go, and words will linger bars ahead of time. It abuses remedial, thudding riffs like a drunk’s pounding stream on the ashy, piss-eroded urinal cakes in the dive bar bathroom you’re destined to hear the song spill out of.
That’d be a harsher indictment if Them Hounds didn’t do it so exceptionally well. It’s Guitar Hero worship executed without a single hiccup, with seasoned production that allows you to hear everything as intended. The double-edged sword is that being so correct doesn’t leave much room for happy accidents. It makes something like the Sly & the Family Stone get-down-turned-alt-rock anthem “Sweet Nothin’” — or if The Black Keys had made S.C.I.E.N.C.E. instead of Incubus — a sweetly received sucker punch. Too often, Them Hounds sits pat on the blues-rock landing, leaning more toward a Memphis boogie or swampy N’awlins dip but not willing to dive off the cliff into entirely uncharted waters — if not on a grander scale, at least for themselves. “Sweet Nothin’” is the Picasso to the title track’s paint by numbers. Because how much can you love something when you know what it was going to look like all along?
Ames is the savior to it all, elevating the familiar by sheer force of will. Clear, crisp and confident at every register, she injects some intrigue into the cliché-anchored “Glass Limbs” (“How can you dance with the devil when he’s already covered in flames”) with an alternative series of snarls and coos. Similarly, “Heart Attack” doesn’t completely flatline, in thanks to the electric pulse her voice provides.
Maybe the middle ground is closer to “Whiskey Valley.” The song runs the way the tightly clutched playbook prescribes, but there’s something about the grit and punk lilt to the six-string attack tearing at its innards, and Ames’ haunted take brings it to a new plane. Dark and inspired, it’s here where we hear — all too clear — that life depends on adaptation, and that the survival of the fittest necessitates a commitment to forgoing the traditions of all those who came before you, no matter how much you want to be them.
