When Mike Wiebe isn't wailing hard with the high-impact Texas rock band
the Riverboat Gamblers, he brings his estimable pipes to
High Tension Wires, a decidedly more cool and collected outfit whose lean, precise attack is just a bit too hard to be pop and a little too smart to play in the same league as the
Gamblers. But one thing both bands have in common is they both rock (albeit in different ways), and they both know how to make their music communicate in the studio.
Midnight Cashier runs through 11 songs in less than 23 minutes, and there isn't an ounce of waste to be found -- the tempos are energetic, Mark Ryan's guitar rings out with melody while maintaining the frantic rhythm, Mike Throneberry's drums add swing while hitting as dead-on as a metronome, and the lyrics are street smart meditations on the stuff of regular life as well as the imaginings of bad dreams, literate without letting a thesaurus get in the way. If most of
Midnight Cashier sounds more "new wave" than "punk," it's new wave in the same way as
Devo or
the Pretenders, which is to say it still has a rebellious soul and plenty of backbone, and
High Tension Wires don't miss a trick on this album, which more than delivers on the promise of their debut. ~ Mark Deming