Chris Duarte Group: "Tailspin Headwhack"

I could tell this cat was nothing from the third-grade way he laced up his Converse All-Stars on the back of the CD. It got worse from there. The first non-family member he thanked was Ted Nugent (a white, confederate hunter who once defended himself by saying that he was a "real nigger"), so I banish him to hell on principle. I'm not one to judge, however, so maybe this joint is for you if you like a redneck keg-funk sound augmented by such verbal gems as "You want/ you take/ things you don't need/ you call hard times/ and I call it greed/ short day/ long night/ cruising this town/ in your heart/ gotta know/ you're just going down." So that's what greed is? Obviously, the guy's real deep.

He can play guitar though, and for that he deserves praise. Praise in the same way that Clinton deserves praise for commandeering oral sex: yeah, he's successful, but in a trailer-park sort of way. I'm curious what Nugent would say about the unforgivable quasi-hiphop beat on "People Say." I don't have a thing for Nugent, but Chris Duarte's choice of friends goes to his artistic credibility. Hopefully, if either of these guys ever makes it to Queens, they'll get robbed. He is simply the updated model of the whiteman-blues guitar prodigy who wastes his creativity making sure his jeans are ripped the right way.

The title track sounds like something my friends would have jammed to in the months around their 13th birthdays. A sample: "Hit the street/ into the wind/ (undecipherable) sick/ and I need my close friend." From what I can gather, "close friend" refers either to booze or to women, and however you take it, his choice of wording pegs him as an incurable softy. To sum up, I would not be surprised if Duarte's career went into a tailspin because his head is whacked. (Silvertone Records)

--Jesse Orleans

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