Tracy Shedd / Wet & Reckless split on Fort Lowell Records

Google will tell you Wet & Reckless is some kind of lesser DUI charge and a lot of people seem interested in working out it's legal definition online. In this case it's a four piece out of LA and the A-Side of a split from Fort Lowell with Tracy Shedd.

Wet & Reckless is rocking a sloppy, jangly indie guitar sound all under toe of that girl group ooooo's chorus sound of decades earlier. The hint of vocal reverb and tambourine/snare combined with a Built to Spill sound of bent warbling guitar strings. It's optimistic pop punk, granted lyrically it isn't all sunshine "Fill my boots /with heavy rocks....I was built / to go down, down, down" but It sounds like a contemporary combination of that side of the country, minus the deliberate fidelity challenged sound. Their working with a kinder gentler indie sincerity...informed, I'm sure, by the sunny west coast.
But damn, does Seattle have to pay for your weather?
Do you ever even get sad?
This just sounds like the sickening idea I have of the Pacific...the sun, beaches, wax on wax off, harmonizing....well adjusted. Just don't expect me to sympathize with your happy go lucky ways. We have seasons in Brooklyn!

Tracy Shedd with "Tear it up" on the other side appropriately takes things in that mysterious noir side direction of the surf city. This is what happens at night when you have a population isolated by their cars, and little separate houses with picket fences....you get introspective...you drink...and are all alone. Maybe it's the vocal quality though that I'm reading into...a bit Sarah Dougher, or the Spinnanes delicate haunting rock sound. It's definitely at home on a lynch set, velvet curtains, singing into a lightbulb. Or it's the slow strum of the tremolo electric with harmonic mandolin working into a dreamy Mazzy Star feel.

It's a bi-polar roller-coaster ride of flipping sides. I'm always into the color vinyl FL presses, this one is blood red, and the dual sided monochromatic printed sleeves...the usual great package from the Fort of singles that is Lowell.