Rippin E Brakes, Rippin E Brakes (self-released)
Bang a left onto I-89 just before Concord and keep going until you really start to worry about wolves and bears, and you’re in Contoocook, home of this self-proclaimed “rock ‘n’ roll country” band, whose overall effect is a hard-Americana cross between Allman Brothers, old Bob Dylan vinyl and the Eels, owing to the too-much-information approach to frontman Derek Astles fixations on porn, married women, strippers, drugs and the generally hopeless situation of being a Millennial. The sounds mostly range from low-key po-faced jam-outs (“Bailed”) to Zappa-does-country (“Too Much”) to lonely harp-and-fiddle bluegrass (“Frozen”) to Mumfords-with-an-on-the-phone-patch (“Message to Rita”). Astles’s voice has an appropriately damaged angst to it, like Tom Petty doing a Van Morrison impression, employed to best effect on this record when it sounds like the boys were too drunk to notice that the vocals were starting to get lost in the mix. A — Eric W. Saeger