Ones To Watch: White Reaper

A gang of school friends from Louisville, Kentucky, who grew up playing together in grizzly hardcore bands, the White Reaper lads attended college for three whole days before looking each other in the eye and asking “What the hell are we doing here?” Dropping out, growing their hair long and spending a year on the road with Priests and Deerhoof, their lives have been hurtling out of control ever since – and they sound like they’re loving every minute of it.

Led by the strained wails of frontman Tony Esposito, their punk roots are coated in candied, pop tunes as razorblade Buzzcocks riffs collide with cutesy keyboard melodies on debut album White Reaper Does It Again. Opener ‘Make Me Wanna Die’ storms out of the blocks, thundering along to stirring, distorted waves of vein-bursting bluster, but it’s the unshackled might of ‘Pills’ that really unleashes the big, rousing, Feeder guitar cries and feels like a real summer, top-down, driving anthem.

Strutting, glam-stomp ‘Candy’ sounds like a lost Marc Bolan boogie turbo-charged with bratty Ramones scowls, and single ‘Sheila’ chugs from a disenfranchised slacker tantrum into an air-punching bounce along. But it’s left to album closer, ‘B.T.K.’, to send pulse rates stratospheric and end things in a surge of high-octane, hard-moshing, righteous, positivity.

Raw, over-excited and fit-to-burst, it’s refreshing to hear a band unleash 100mph, scuzzy pop songs with such fresh-faced ambition and ferocious hunger. It’s probably only a matter of time before the hipster whiskers start to sprout and the cynicism sets in, but for now White Reaper capture that first thrilling, ‘boys-in-the-band’ flush you get with idealistic young guitar groups. Long may their misspent youth continue.

White Reaper Does It Again is out 17 July on Polyvinyl Records.

 

Kevin Irwin
@trotterfist

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

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