Marah
Kids in Philly
On Sale Now
For $10.48

Kids in Philly has some of the best real rock and roll to come along in years. Of course, the nature of today's music business dooms the record to semi-obscurity. Still it's a great ride for those who get a chance to hear it.

Marah is clearly a band literally bursting with musical ideas and tales to tell about the seedy underbelly of backstreets Philadelphia, their hometown. Singer David Bielanko sounds like Greetings From Asbury Park-era Springsteen on the motormouthed opener "Faraway You." Against a pounding drum, banjo and xylophone, among other instruments, Bielanko takes you on a bus tour of the characters that inhabit his fair city. The Springsteen comparison is even more apparent on the next song, and first single, "Point Breeze." "Headlight cars do battle on the boulevard... Orchestrated stars all laughin' at the weather charts," Bielanko sings. Perhaps to underline the point, the band included a bluegrass style cover of Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" as a b-side on their "Point Breeze" single. "Point Breeze" also recalls Van Morrison in upbeat "Brown-Eyed Girl" mode.

"It's Only Money, Tyrone" is the gritty, hard-hitting kind of thing the Stones used to do best. "The History of Where Someone Has Been Killed" visits Stones territory as well with some wicked, slashing Keith Richards-style guitar chords. About two minutes in, the song cranks into gear with dueling guitars and the nastiest harmonica solo I've ever heard, courtesy of David's brother, Serge Bielanko. The band until recently also included the rhythm section of Ronnie Vance on drums and Danny Metz on bass.

"The Catfisherman" is an insistent acoustic slide blues with sampled street sounds, crowd chatter and other sound effects squawking in the background as Bielanko delivers a laundry list of the things he's got to take to his "spot 'neath the bridge by the Expressway." "Round Eye Blues" sounds at first listen like a weird version of "Every Breath You Take" with banjo and castanets. Then you realize it's a song about a veteran haunted by flashbacks and by the spirit of rock and roll past. "And I could still hear the far off, tin canny sound of their machine guns come unwound," Bielanko sings. "And I was shakin' like Little Richard and I was sweatin' like old James Brown." Later the song quotes "Be My Baby" before wrapping up with a nice trumpet solo.

"Every inch of the city reminds me of you," Bielanko sings in a Marlboro Light rasp on the Philly soul-informed "My Heart is the Bums On the Street." "Barstool Boys" is a Faces-style ballad with bottleneck slide, banjo and plenty of whoops and hollers. And "This Town" is the kind of elegiac album closer Marah labelmate and mentor Steve Earle has been known to produce in recent years.

Perhaps the only misstep here is "From the Skyline of A Great Big Town" which seems a bit tuneless and uninteresting, despite some good guitar work, compared to the rest of the disc.

In that respect, the song resembles some of the weaker moments on the band's 1998 debut Let's Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later On Tonight. Of course that album did have it's share of highlights: the Stonesy, horn-inflected opener "Fever," the slow building, well-observed "Formula, Cola, Dollar Draft," the slide acoustic blues "Baby Love," and the finger-popping Springsteen-like "Firecracker." But it's safe to say, with Kids In Philly, the band has taken a great leap forward. With modern rock radio obsessed with lame novelty crap like that Bloodhound Gang song, that probably won't mean much. But in a perfect world, "Point Breeze" would be a huge hit on the beaches this summer and Kids In Philly would show everybody what real rock and roll is all about.

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