Out of Time

In a town full of band connections ripe for a game of six degrees of musical separation, add another point on the increasingly convoluted web that begins with local garage-punks Be Your Own Pet. Enter new-wave-inflected punks Cheap Time, who owe their lineage to the scrappy punk band that has produced JEFF, Turbo Fruits and Deluxin’.

Cheap Time was founded by Henderson, Tenn.’s Jeff Novak, who ditched his group the Rat Traps to form a new lineup with Jemina Pearl and Nathan Vasquez. The band went through the usual fits and starts, and when Pearl and Vasquez split to form BYOP in 2002, Novak—who’d played in his own one-man band before Rat Traps—found himself back where he started. But that’s not such a bad thing. Forced to rebuild, Novak recruited bassist Stephen Braren and drummer Jon Sewell, and the result is a batch of spastic, gritty garage-punk that holds its own against any BYOP-related incarnation.

But even though they’ve been around for some two years, it’s possible local rock audiences still haven’t caught one of their high-energy live shows. “We don’t play in Nashville very often,” Novak says by email. “I think we’ve played in Memphis a lot more. We have more of a following there.”

Still, they’re picking up steam locally—even if for many people, their introduction to the band was opening for the prolific Memphis punk-metal purveyor Jay Reatard at Mercy Lounge in April.

Cheap Time is hit-and-run, lo-fi garage punk with a bark. With a running time of about 28 clattering minutes, there’s no messing around here—just raw energy barely contained. Album opener “Too Late” blasts off with a rumble of big noise, stabbing guitar hits and wobbly beats. “Get away for your good sake / Take your time but don’t be late,” Novak sings in a jarring whine. “Glitter and Gold” cements the loud-and-fast tone, working in a scuzzy classic-rock riff, demolition-style snare and cut-time breaks that jerk the beat.

Elsewhere, tracks such as “Zig Zag” and standout “People Talk,” with its nasally auctioneer’s repetition, make the band sound like punk on Devo. Throughout the album they plant their snotty roots alongside Wire, Redd Kross, the Sex Pistols and The Ramones. Even the album’s minimalist cover art is faithful to the era, depicting the three band members with disaffected gazes, its sepia tone the stuff of late-’70s punk vinyl, courtesy of rock photographer Jimmy Abegg, father of Novak’s former girlfriend Pearl.

What Cheap Time lacks in complexity and discernability lyrically, it makes up for in full-throttle, delirious aggression. And hey, this is punk. Novak wrote most of the lyrics—which range from subjects such as going to school to falling down—while working at the Belcourt Theatre. “I was a horrible worker,” Novak says. “All I did was space out and write songs the whole time I worked there.”

Not surprisingly, Novak got fired. But like the dissolution of the Rat Traps, a better fate awaited. While gigging on the West Coast recently, Novak met Larry Hardey of California’s In The Red Records at a Redd Kross show and now shares label space with Reatard and Black Lips. Cheap Time continue to open for Reatard on tour this summer, and have plans to be back in town by summer’s end, so catch them before another side project crashes and burns.