CD Release Party - Batteries At The Turf Club Tonight

Download: Batteries - Childproof
Download: Batteries - "Recording The Stuff" (Via Reveille Magazine)

Opening for Vicious Vicious and Jeremy Messersmith tonight at the Reveille Magazine sponsored show at the Turf Club is a group called Batteries. When the Duluth/St. Paul quintet, whose sedate and mellow alt-rock recall a soulful hybrid of The Zincs and The Narrator, takes the stage tonight, you may recognize singer/guitarist Dave Frankenfield. That's because Frankenfield plays the drums and bass for Minneapolis alt-country chanteuse Haley Bonar (who, full disclosure, is on the record label that Ian runs).

Batteries doesn't sound anything like countrypolitan. Which is fine, because the swinging, shuffling beat, and rumbling bartone sax lines of "Childproof", (along with its folksy chord progression and subtle Hammond organ lines), should appear to anyone with one foot in vintage 60s garage/surf-rock and the other in 90s slack-rock like Pavement. The latter is especially the case in jangly rocker "The Offer", when Frankenfield best approximates Stephen Malkmus' sharply lackadaisical sense of melody and drive during the song's rousing chorus. If those two tracks are indicative of the rest of 11 song LP That Great Grandsuck Of The Sea, then one can expect a record whose subtle assets reveal themselves over time.

Show is tonight at the Turf Club and is 21+.

Read a feature about Batteries at Reville Magazine.

Batteries MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)