On Friday, White Reaper released their third and best LP, You Deserve Love. “Run around and tell the gang / Polish up your dusty fangs.” It’s an electrifying feeling, even if they’re the sort of cuddly band Mom can bring home to you. “Rally up and dress to kill / Lace your boots and crush your pills,” the title track’s chorus begins, amid fake crowd noise that cements the mass-romantic Cheap Trick vibe. It is ideal, in this day and age, to approach this style of Zippo-flicking guitar music with, if not irony, then at least some measure of cornball self-awareness: White Reaper’s 2015 full-length debut was called White Reaper Does It Again, which is the second-funniest album title in their brief catalog, after 2017’s The World’s Best American Band. A healthy death drive is a necessary component of keeping this music alive. A roaring bonfire fueled by the bodies of knuckleheads, warming the bodies of other knuckleheads. “That made me want to be a musician.” The urge to rock ’n’ roll, in 2019 as in 1988 as in 1967, is a fundamentally self-destructive impulse. “What’s his name in the pool with the vodka, and his mom is there, and he’s just talking about how he wants to be dead?” Hater mused during a July interview with Michael Tedder for Stereogum. I mention this because a gentleman named Ryan Hater, who plays keyboards in the young Louisville, Kentucky, rock band White Reaper, evidently found it quite inspiring. Cut back to his mother, still making The Face. Being who I am, it’s just like-here, watch.” And then he rolls into the pool. “I don’t dig being the person I am,” he concludes, struggling to elaborate. “Do you think you might be covering up some pain?” Holmes’s interviewer wonders, and he responds by cracking open a vodka bottle and pouring half of it in his mouth, and half of the rest in the general vicinity of his face. Hah- hah!” He blames, or rather credits, rock ’n’ roll for this: “If you can tour one year, it’ll take four years off your life.” There is a Santa glass in the cupholder of his pool chair his mother is sitting poolside, terrified and resigned and making the most viscerally upsetting face in ’80s cinema, non– Large Marge category. He estimates that he drinks five pints of vodka a day, although: “Five quarts? Pints? Who cares? Yeah, I’m a happy camper. “I’m a full-blown alcoholic,” Holmes concedes, slurring cordially.
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