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The Billion: Aisle 5
Now, this is a weird disc.
I mean that in a good way. The
Billion is a three-piece group from Chapel Hill that on the surface plays
straight-ahead no-frills rock music. But
on repeated listens, other influences tend to creep in and out throughout the
album. On first listen, I thought the
Billion sounded very similar to Southern Culture on the Skids theres that
dirty kind of southern boogie feel to many of the songs, where the band manages
to be super-tight and super-sloppy all at the same time.
Kirk Bryson, Paula Childers, and Bruce Stevens know that in rock music,
feeling is much more important to a song than musical ability, and this shows on
nearly every track on the disc. Thats
not to say that they cant play its more that their abilities take a
back seat to the song itself. The lyrics are playful, showing
that the band does not take itself too seriously.
Songs such as Dirty Little Viking and Zombie Stomp bring to
mind artists such as Frank Zappa and even They Might Be Giants (Hey
Motherfucker, in particular). I
can only assume (since the liner notes along with the original copy of the CD
got lost in the mail) that Bryson and Stevens handle the majority of vocals, and
the focus of many of the songs are the call-and-response singing between them.
The final song, Nothing, is a quiet tune layered with guitar
effects and is a great end for this album (though, at only 8 songs and less than
a half an hour, Aisle 5 seems more like an EP).
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