reigning sound

More Link Wray than Van Morrison, Reigning Sound’s latest overflows with life experience and timeless rock ’n’ roll.

It’s been five years since Reigning Sound released their fourth studio album, Love and Curses. Since then, frontman Greg Cartwright has had to attend more memorial services than most people should in twice that long—and one of them was for his friend and former bandmate Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. (aka “Jay Reatard”). Cartwright’s fifth long-player (and first for Merge Records) is aptly titled Shattered, and it carries the weight and emotion of a songwriter who’s approaching middle age with a seasoned soul that most millennials can’t even fake with a harmonica holder.

Reigning Sound now has a new lineup, and it translates to Shattered having more in common with Shack Three Track-era Link Wray than the hard-driving R&B garage-rock rave-ups that Cartwright rocked with Oblivions. But the album still has a tension similar to Cartwright’s previous recordings—only here it comes from a place of mediation, rather than a place of reaction. Even the more energetic organ-grinding numbers like “North Cackalacky Girl” play with a maturity that’s humbled by life—but not in that bland, Caucasian sportcoat-rock way that so many bands tend to fall into after the singer’s first kid is born.

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