Slack's Long-Lost Press Your Luck Surfaces on Bandcamp [Not-So-Fresh Tracks]

Gather around children, it’s time for a story! A long time ago in a Nashville not unlike our own there was a band named Slack and they were fucking great. They played brawling, snarling bubble-grunge with lots of hooks and very little bullshit. They were high-energy, low-pretense rock band that was slightly out of step with the arty emo Myspace era, but totally instep with a defiantly uncool vibe that defined the best early '90s-harkening Augts-rock Middle Tennessee had to offer. 

They made a record for Superdrag’s vanity label, toured a bit, broed down with Dave Grohl and made another record with Superdrag/Foo Fighters producer and certified hit-maker Nick Raskulinecz. Their song “Burn Out” was on the soundtrack to the Goldie Hawn/Susan Sarandon grown-up-groupie flick The Banger Sisters. (Whether that counts as a career high or a career low is up to you.) My timeline may be off and the memories are a bit blurry (I was drunk a lot for the entire decade), but it seemed like Slack were gonna be the band broke out of Music City (again, I was drunk).

Then in classic Nashville Curse fashion, the band imploded and Press Your Luck — the record they made with Raskulinecz — was shelved, destined to never see the light of day. And then there was the Great Purging of Slack’s digital footprint and the slow steady fade from the Nashville music scene’s collective memory as  frontman Chris Slack changed his name, moved to L.A. and started another band. A lot has happened to the local rock scene since Slack folded — people in the outside world actually acknowledge its existence, for starters — and it’s wild to think that the band has been kaput for the better part of a decade.

This is all to say that Slack’s lost classic Press Your Luck is no longer lost. The album showed up on Bandcamp this week, and boy howdy is it a rager! I'm pretty sure I like these dudes more now than I did back in the day. (And I really liked 'em back in the day.) Songs like “Teenage Zombie” — essentially a pre-write of JEFF the Brotherhood’s “U Got The Look" — and “Over the Threshold” are snotty and indignant in all the right ways. Tunes like “Eyeliner” and “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night” capture all of the tension and impudence of Nashville’s rock scene on the edge of an explosion. Good times. 

https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2861530218/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/transparent=true/