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Cheap Girls - Find Me a Drink Home
By Cassie Gressell
Published: September 11, 2008
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Band: Cheap Girls
Album: Find Me a Drink
Label: Bermuda Mohawk/Los Diaper/Quote Unquote
Overall Score: 3/5

 

The nights of…well…debauchery hinted at by a title like Find Me a Drink Home paints an instant picture in your mind. This is a party album. This is an album to blast on the way to the bar. This is an album to have fun with. In this case, judging a book (or, more accurately – an album) by it’s cover won’t lead you too far from the actual result. Here Cheap Girls have pulled together eleven tracks of fast, hard-hitting pop-punk with all the attitude and swagger (mumbled swagger, but swagger nonetheless) that you’d expect to hear on an album of this title. And maybe that doesn’t exactly guarantee the most unique listen you’ll ever come across, but it does work well as the soundtrack to a pretty good night out on the town.

“Kind of on Purpose” jumps straight to the action with a jerky melody and somewhat rough production that lends the illusion of listening to a band play in a garage as opposed to on a legitimate release. This is an effect maintained for the entire album, for better or for worse. In most cases it works well for Cheap Girls, contributing even more to the band’s already edgy sound, but there are instances on Find Me a Drink Home where this quality might distract listeners that are more used to a clean, polished album.

Find Me a Drink Home stays in the vein of “Kind of on Purpose” for the most part (look to tracks like the jittery “Stay High (Magic)” and “I Should Never” for further examples of this), but that’s not to say Cheap Girls shy away from a more stripped down approach on the album. “Her and Cigarettes” clocks in at just over a minute and a half, but the swirling acoustic guitar and smooth vocals of the track are enough to show that Cheap Girls are just as capable of providing simple, almost cute songs as they are muffled pop-punk.

Find Me a Drink Home doesn’t provide much in terms of innovation, and admittedly some of the songs do tend to blur together, but these are both excusable offenses when you take into account that Cheap Girls are providing a much rawer take on a genre that is normally all but drowned out by pro-tools of one sort or another. The band makes this rough delivery work for them, and as a result, Cheap Girls might just be a breath of fresh air for many. Or, they might just be fun. But really, are either of those options a bad one?



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