by Brett Williams (@brettwilliams6)
Tom Brown, who records as Lone Striker, Teenage Tom Petties, and one half of indie rock duo Rural France, has released seven albums in the last five years. Though relatively ignored in larger mainstream music publications, Brown has spent that time building a sturdy reputation in punk-adjacent corners of the music blogosphere, with all three of his recording projects getting reliably glowing reviews from sites like Rosy Overdrive, No Ripcord, and The Jangle Pop Hub. But with four albums out in as many years, it’s safe to think of Teenage Tom Petties as his flagship project - for the time being at least.
The project, which began as a mostly self-recorded vehicle for Brown’s more raucous and aggressive songs, has since evolved into a five-piece band made up of his siblings, friends, and label bosses, who have convened now for two of TTP’s albums - 2023’s Hotbox Daydreams and last year’s Rally The Tropes. For the latter, Brown mobilized the group, whose members hail from both the UK and the American Northeast, for a two-day recording session in Providence, Rhode Island. The result of their effort is a 19-minute blitz of high-tempo, high-energy, heartland garage jams that continue Brown’s run of dominance in the new blogrock era. But while the band’s prolific output makes it easy to think of Rally The Tropes as just another entry in their one-album-after-another hotstreak, this one feels like more of a statement - one that imagines the band as just a little bit bigger than they actually are.
As screeching dual guitar leads and frantic vocal performances make the performances seem like they’re about to fall apart, Brown’s relentlessly catchy songwriting is what holds it all together. The vocal mic clips and crunchy, distorted power chords on tracks like “American Breakfast” and “Tough Cookies” make the songs seem as though they’re trying to break out of containment, ready to explode. “Freaky Friday” feels like it actually does, as a glistening synth line soars above the earthy drums and guitars in the song’s chorus.
Teenage Tom Petties have just over 200 monthly listeners on Spotify. That’s not to say listener data on streaming services says anything about a band’s vitality and importance, or about how many people actually listen to them - it just means they’re not famous, and they don’t sell out arenas when they play. But on Rally The Tropes, the band plays like they’re famous and the songs Brown writes could fill arenas. In fact, they don’t really fit anywhere else, which is what gives the album that ready-to-explode feeling. The rooms this music is confined to are too small to contain it.
“I pictured us walking on stage to ridiculous intro music in front of a huge crowd,” Brown says of the writing and recording process. “I wanted the record to feel that big and unpredictable, with as much raw garage energy as Brad (Kreiger, engineer) could squeeze out of us.” Brown and company aren’t megastars - they probably never will be, and it’s doubtful any of them would ever want to be. But it can still be fun to pretend, and Rally The Tropes is exactly that - a brilliantly crafted and wonderfully executed exercise in playing pretend.