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Screw the mainstream if you really want to get your rocks off you have to go to the underground. That's just what we plan to do with this series, take some of the best emerging bands that are out blowing away hardcore fans on the underground music scene.

Hamilton Field - Hamilton Field
Label: Self released
Rating:

The music of Hamilton Field evokes, if not the Garage, then at least a well appointed basement (and by well appointed, I mean, of course, a fridge full of beer and the requisite number of punk rock and Playboy posters on the wall) where these three musicians chase the rock and roll muse around the room like Pepe Le Pew in hot pursuit of the latest black cat to hit the white paint. As brash and life affirming as the early Who and as down and dirty as a barrel of black leather switchblades, if not the Standells themselves, Hamilton Field are the new contenders in the power pop sweepstakes, thankfully leaning decidedly toward the �power' side of the equation.

It's like Cheap Trick's little brothers went back in time, kidnapped Pete Townshend and siphoned off all the good stuff for themselves. You know when I'm talking about. Right before he started his mission to prove himself a Serious Composer by writing Tommy, and thus losing his perspective and all use as a rock and roller. When he began the long, inevitable slouch toward the Bethlehem of the tortured artiste, losing that spark of primitive fire that ignited the Who in the first place and bonded them to their fans in ways rarely seen. Hamilton Field sounds like us, like they're regular people with regular concerns and sometimes lousy lives that they get through by singing; and maybe by listening we can get through a little easier, too. No, �love, reign over me!' pronouncements, no thinly disguised Messiah stories starring themselves under assumed names. HF recognizes that it is the community that rules, not the fevered ambitions of the lost child genius. No, Hamilton Field is an old fashioned Rock and Roll CD by an old fashioned Rock and Roll band, and I mean that in the best sense possible.

The opening cut, Girlfriend springs like an electronic cat from the primordial, varispeed swamp, hits the ground running and the CD doesn't let up from there.

Change turns on greasy, ill mannered guitars and leering vocals, all service-with-a-sneer/angels-with-dirty-faces. Maria is a pop masterpiece worthy of both Brian
Wilson and the Replacements, it's aching beauty tempered by the kind of blessed abandon the �Mats should have been more famous for. The songs are all arranged in a loose-but-tight fashion that is a difficult balance for some veteran bands to strike, which makes the assuredness and smart mouth authority of this, a debut CD, all that more remarkable.

After nigh unto a decade of being pilloried and hamstrung by hordes of revolving Doors impersonators (Dear Pearl Jam, See what you've started! Love, Tim),The Big Beat is once again in the good and trustworthy hands of true believers. Catch Hamilton Field at a club near you when they travel through your town and, if they ask, please let them sleep on your couch. We're all in this together, after all.

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