Cambridge DRUG RUG, gets fair review from Pitchfork Options

[TEX]

I've never heard them, but thought someone here might care ...


Drug Rug
Drug Rug
[Black and Greene; 2007]
Rating: 6.5

Bedroom pop goes meta with Drug Rug, a duo whose apocryphal first date took place on top of an actual bed in an actual, if unspecified, Boston, Mass., bedroom-- located perhaps a few blocks down Mass Ave from the Middle East, the Cambridge rock club where the two worked and first met in 2006. And if their love is a tenuous peg to hang an album on, tell that to fellow Cantabridgians Damon & Naomi or Major Stars' Wayne & Kate.

Since these two are each other's whole world-- and there are only two of 'em, after all-- it shouldn't be much of a shock that their debut splits some. That is to say, you've got your drunken, mostly Sarah Cronin-voiced caterwaulers: CocoRosie covering the Carter family, maybe; and then you've got your singing deep-into-your-bandmate's-eyes crooners, which are more lush and domestic and by process of elimination probably belong to Tommy Allen, Cronin's bandmate and boyfriend. Like a good couple, though, they double up on nearly every vocal, so who knows exactly.

More Moldy Peaches than Matt & Kim, to keep up with this m/f duo thing, there's not a lot of celebration of love in song to Drug Rug. "For The Rest of Your Life" yips and yawls in the kind of underwater fidelity you'd get from a 78, which matches up pretty well with the duo's professed interest in Hank Williams and June Carter before she married Johnny. "Lie, Lie, Lie" clanks and jingles and croaks like a Joanna Newsom outtake if Newsom's harp was a quarter-size guitar and her voice was a bit more childlike; Cronin also spits the same sort of complicated fairytale narrative, which is incongruous, since by the next song, "Cut the Meat", the two of them are back out on the porch with their bare feet mashing the earth.

But if stretches of Drug Rug tremble and pose like a child playing dress-up, the record eventually gets assertive. "Day I Die" and "Alright" are chirpy, gliding Beatles-esque marching tunes that have the kind of joy to them you get the feeling DR would like to express in every song, not just a couple of them. And "Tiny People" is their curled-up gem and album finisher: "You don't have to worry, you don't have to panic no more." Take your own advice and you'll be fine.

-Zach Baron, October 03, 2007

[MERZ]

I would never listen to them because of their terrible name.

[T-Bone]

I would never listen to them because of their terrible name.

They're not as terrible as the name makes them sound, but 6.5 sounds like an accurate review. I've only heard the stuff they have up on MySpace, though. It's okay.

[Slavic Wax]

Drug Rug is an awesome band name! Lotta Boston bands been reviewed there this year actually....Ho-Ag, Hallelujah The Hills

[MERZ]

Drug Rug is an awesome band name!

Not!
is a grammatical construction in the English language expressing disagreement that became a sarcastic catchphrase in North America in the 1990s. A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause and then an emphatic "Not!" is postfixed. The result is a negation of the original declarative statement. Popularized in North America in the 1990s by the Saturday Night Live skit and subsequent movie Wayne's World, it can be found earliest in print in an 1893 Princeton Tiger (March 30) 103: "An Historical Parallel-- Not." Most often used jocularly, but also be used to express annoyance, it was such a popular catch phrase that it was selected as the 1992 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

[Slavic Wax]

Well Merz, now you've done it. You need to provide three, never before used, band names better than Drug Rug. Go!

[MERZ]

Well Merz, now you've done it. You need to provide three, never before used, band names better than Drug Rug. Go!

Princeton Tigers
Word Of The Year
American Dialect Society