Catbirds Say Yeah!

Still catching up on last week's postings...it seemed to be the week when all the stuff I'd been writing for a month finally hit the web.


THE CATBIRDS – Catbirds Say Yeah

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Catbirds Say Yeah
Catbirds
Iddy Bitty

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Chandler Travis is surely the busiest working musician on Cape Cod, splitting his time between the Catbirds, the Chandler Travis Three, the Chandler Travis Philharmonic and the Incredible Casuals. That last outfit may ring some bells among older Bostonites; it has been performing around Beantown (and the Cape) since 1980. Before the Incredible Casuals, Travis performed in Steve Shook’s Shook and the Club Wow, a comedy/music duo that toured regularly with George Carlin.

So, right, grizzled veteran, one more baby boomer refusing to give up the rock ‘n roll ghost, yadda yadda yadda….

Except that Catbirds Say Yeah! is a pretty damn fine record, regardless of the vintage of its performers. It’s well worth saying “Yeah!” about, even if you hadn’t been prompted by the album title. Travis and his compadres – drummer Rikki Bates, all-purpose player Dinty Childs (guitar, mandolin, accordion, etc.), and guitarist Steve Wood – play a giddily intense, goofily hardball kind of garage rock that sounds like the Sonics crossed with early R.E.M., or maybe Big Dipper cut with first album Feelies. Catbirds Say Yeah may not be “of” the moment, but it’s totally “in” the moment, wholly committed and totally engaged to the point where the music hardly sounds retro at all.

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You can stream the album here.