Search - High Strung :: Get the Guests

"Joyful, uptight, cymbal-bashing sound that borrows as much from the Motor City's recent garage-rock scene as from the Beatles. The New Wave revival has produced its first acolytes." -- ROLLING STONE "The High Strung is worthy of the legendary Nuggets box set." -- BLENDER "We vouch that The High Strung is actually geeky in a cool way." -- VILLAGE VOICE The High Strung did not set out to write and record its "defining" album but, call it an accident or dub it luck, it has. Get the Guests is surely one of the most original albums released in 2007, and some of its wonder lies in the fact that it doesn't sound like a band trying to do anything ...it just sounds like a band that is. In all aspects, Get the Guests is a far cry from the band's previous two releases (These Are Good Times and Moxie Bravo), but it also makes you listen to those albums and think, "ah, now I see where they were headed this whole time." Character sketches have adorned the band's canon before, but never as much as they do now. "Rimbaud/Rambo" introduces a narrator trying to decide which titular man is a better romantic model, while "The Curator" exposes a malicious museum curator covering the museum walls with his own work. The harmonies are striking, the bass and drums are creative as hell, and Josh Malerman's voice is as unique and convincing as it's ever been. The High Strung's self-abusive tour schedule took them to sixty libraries last summer, a juxtaposition documented by NPR's This American Life and an irony not lost on the hundreds of teens who got to see them for the first time. Bob Pollard called the band's 2005 release Moxie Bravo a "masterpiece" ... a sentiment that frightened the members into thinking that they might not be able to do better. But with Get the Guests, they surely have.