Search - DrugMoney :: Mtn Cty Jnk

The Next Big Thing (Hopefully)

Michael C. Grant | Murrells Inet, SC United States | 01/28/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I saw this band open for Gomez last year and they were incredible. I've been waiting since then for their official disc and it was well worth it. There are so many things to like about this album. I guess the best way to describe them is just to say that if you threw Nirvana, the Pixies, and Weezer together you would have DrugMoney. The album has just the right mix of rockers and semi-ballads, sometimes both in the same song. The band has an uncanny knack for putting together hooks. Each song will be playing in your head for hours afterwards. Fisher Meehan is a gifted vocalist and instrumentalist. The rest of the band is tight as well with some great eccentric touches thrown into the mix. Each track is short and straight to the point. I would love to see this band get the recognition they deserve by breaking away from the pack of crap that currently litters the rock landscape. Just think, this is only their first album."

Straight from the MTN CTY

Steve Shanafelt | Asheville, NC | 01/28/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As I write this review, I've just come from the "official" CD release party for MTN CTY JNK at Asheville, NC's Vincent's Ear. DrugMoney just put a fantastic show, one of the best I've seen in the two years I've been keeping tabs on the band, and I saw faces ranging from middle-aged to barely-legal in the room. One man, a gray-haired father in a yellow polo shirt, told me that he really liked the music, but that he was certain that his thirteen year-old son would absolutely love it.That sort of sums up the DrugMoney experience, really. There's an awful lot to like.

Alt-country fans like DrugMoney's music because of songs like "beautiful" with its charged and stunning revisitation of raw acoustic 70's roots-rock. Others find that the poppy aggression of tracks like "trenton makes" and "walk" fills the sonic void between the harder-edged side of the indie scene and the radio-friendly side of commerical college rock. In a few odd places, DrugMoney surprises you with something that you swear is a cover of a song written by Neil Young, originally recorded by Sugar but then totally reworked for a tribute album by The Pixies. It's just like that, only if the ghost of Cobain was at the mixing boards, shoving just a little too much grunge out of frontman Fisher Meehan's voice.That last bit, most of all, is why you should buy a copy of MNT CTY JNK. You'll hear that same slightly bizarre and yet totally sating concoction of sounds in songs like "anyway," "small thinking" and "rough & tumble." It's not that you haven't heard these sounds before -- they're half the foundation for modern indie-rock -- but you've almost certainly never heard it done this well.Meehan would almost certainly claim, as he has at every DrugMoney show, that the songs are about nothing more than "Smoking dope and f**king." But there's so much more to the music than that. Backed by bassist Bill Reynolds (formerly of The Blue Rags), keyboardist Tyler Ramsey (of Wayne Robbins & The Hellsayers) and drummer Jamie Stirling (formerly of The Merle), DrugMoney is a kinetic powerhouse of a band that doesn't mind pulling seemingly conflicting elements together as long as they serve the song.You'll also hear some of the best pop hooks you could want in tunes like "oregon song." Like the rest of this album, it's a catchy track, one you'll find yourself humming absentmindedly as you check the mail, drive your car and make your bed. It's that sort of pop -- fun and satisfying -- and it's hard to want more from a debut by a band that almost no one outside of Asheville has yet discovered. Yet.Esquire, Spin, A.P. and Blender are all running pieces on the band and reviews of the album in the next few months, and CMJ is planning on releasing the DrugMoney song "small thinking" as the lead-off track to their next compilation CD. It's a lot of publicity -- a push that other bands often tour and toil for years to get -- and all for a band that has only briefly toured in short jaunts outside of their mountain city home during their three-year existance.That says a lot when you think about it, because if the big music magazines are pushing this hard for an unproven band's first album, you can bet that there is almost certainly something worth listening to in that cewpie doll-themed pink cardboard case.In all honesty, the big mags are completely on the money with this one. MTN CTY JNK is a fine album, just shy of a masterpiece and an absolutely killer debut. Back in Asheville, where many of the locals are just now listening to MNT CTY JNK for the first time, popping their newly-bought copies into car CD players on the drive back from the show, a whole music scene is waiting to see just how far these local boys can make it. And I imagine that somewhere in Asheville, a thirteen year-old boy is looking quizzically at the pink and black shrink-wrapped album that his gray-haired, yellow-shirted father has just tossed to him from across the room. Perhaps, like you, he's wondering about what exactly it is that lies inside."