The Wake

Experimental indie-punk trio The Slats has constructed a raw and witty, if not intelligent, album in Boom Patrol. Their fifth full-length disc opens with the ballsy, anthem-like hook of “Ironman,” boasting gold-plated fists and proclaiming “there’s no use crying,” before continuing on through the dirty bass sound and pseudo-rap of “Ignatius,” a song with brash lines like “iconoclastic and drastic/I’ll break any law that I don’t think is right.”

Track seven, “I Wrote the Code,” is one of the albums highlights, with lyrics such as “I don’t think that I’ve ever seen/poetry so sharp and clean/since the samurai/cut off their hands/it’s the marketing scheme that curdles the cream.”

Musically, singer and four-string-guitarist Brian Cox, bassist, vocalist, and guitarist Jon Hansen, and percussionist Mark Tietjen have not created an overly complex album. The riffs are fairly basic, though the sort of open fourth and fifth-style vocal harmonies are complemented by a certain measure of garage band flare and an almost hardcore guitar sensibility, not so much in terms of style as much as structural use of dissonance. The bare-bones production of the album is topped off with confident, well-placed vocals, and manages to maintain a sort of pop-awareness.

Overall, The Slats have constructed a solid album that manages to be to the point and simplistic, yet also engaging and interesting. Given the opportunity, it is definitely worth a listen or two.

myspace.com/theslats