THE CONQUERORS - Wyld Time

Never mind the tireless scouting work carried out by venerable labels such as Trouble In Mind and Burger, it's the small High Dive that delivers one of the most surprising new names of the year in the garage-revival orbit. Enter the Conquerors, a six-piece from Kansas City fronted by the brilliant Rory Cameron, on their second release after a mini album put out some time ago only on cassette (in a thoroughly underground edition).

Full-bodied, rip-roaring sound, melodious bass, an outstanding compromise between roughness and sweetness: in effect, this “Wyld Time” is power-pop at the peak of its expressive potential. Nor does it deny shelter to a thoroughly joyful rock propulsion (inherited indirectly from the Monkees), alongside a romantic drive that is a close, very close relative of the new new wave of the 2000s, finding its most complete expression in the triumphant swagger of a title track that sounds in every respect like an outtake from the Strokes, mired as never before in garage-rock evocations, masters of the purity and even slyly crowd-pleasing urgency of their glory days.

Following this line, at times “Wyld Time” sounds like a throwback to the Matthew Melton of Bare Wires or, even more so, the sensational Death By Unga Bunga of their early days, brash and fuelled in the naivety of their twenties by a sacred fire not yet degraded into bland mannerism or self-parody. The game of knowing nods to Casablancas's band becomes explicit with the title of track number seven, “This Is It”, an almost blatant allusion to the New York outfit's celebrated debut, though it doesn't go any further than the title itself: for the rest, it's an unspoiled late-sixties aura that steals the show.

Bright and sharp enough, the Conquerors perhaps have something extra compared to other excellent outfits who have come of age in similar territory in recent years, Gentleman Jesse & His Men chief among them: rather than merely formidable backward glances into a past that is by now pure mythology, their songs come across as sufficiently alive and dripping with energy but, more importantly, they're fun.

Elsewhere, however, they lean more decisively towards all-out citationism (“Can’t You See?”, “Turned Me To Stone”), making use of their prodigious melodic gift and resetting to zero any possible claim to contemporary relevance. What dominates are the beat-group animations, the killer Farfisa organs, and a knack for retro styling far more convincing than in many acts already widely credited within the great circus of the derivative, even without weighing down an impeccably precise transposition with heavy-handedness, down to the tiniest detail. With “Too Good To Be True” they brush against the highest seat in dusty Nuggets territory with the same authority that this year already saw the Cool Ghouls enchant with the blissfulness of their jangle-pop reinterpretations, letting slip just a touch of Beatles-esque inflection at the close, but without overdoing it.

This unbridled inclination towards a revival as savvy as it is sincere amounts to a solid claim as among the most convincing heirs of Reigning Sound and Resonars, given that the models themselves still remain out of reach. To leave no horizon unexplored, Rory and co. also dig into the back room of Coral-branded dreams (“Guess I Was Wrong”), managing to sound personal and credible even on the thousandth recycling of the Byrds-ian gospel, whose intact fragrance they replicate down to the last detail (perhaps filtered through Paisley Underground, why not?).

What's missing - inevitably - is the recognition that would earn them proper consecration, but while we wait for it to arrive, well, jot the name down somewhere: The Conquerors, really not bad at all.

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18/12/2016