Ten Day Bender is the debut album from Alaskan rockers, The Whipsaws.
"...whether it be a quasi-heavy metal avalanche of sludgy guitars or the delicate interplay between traditional instruments like fiddle and lap steel, the band sounds searingly [+]Ten Day Bender is the debut album from Alaskan rockers, The Whipsaws.
"...whether it be a quasi-heavy metal avalanche of sludgy guitars or the delicate interplay between traditional instruments like fiddle and lap steel, the band sounds searingly ‘live’ either way."
-American UK, April 2006
"Amazingly diverse and accomplished for a debut. If they were from anywhere but Alaska, they'd be huge."
-American UK, April 2006
"This is modern-day Americana/roadhouse jukebox material at its finest, and The Whipsaws deliver it like a precious newborn baby into the uncertain arms of a needful America. There isn’t a song on this album that isn’t pure, true, straight-up and from the gut..."
-PULSE of the Twin Cities, June 2006
"Anchorage, Alaska`s answer to the Drive-By Truckers."
-Robinson, Miles Of Music
The Whipsaws: Ten Day Bender (****)
The trappings of "Ten Day Bender" resemble a book. The case image is a scan of stained canvas, the work is labeled as "by the Whipsaws" and songs are listed in chapters, not tracks. The CD booklet proclaims the 10 compositions "a novel."
A novel? I was excited to see those words. When the infrequent concept album comes along, it is rarely so cohesive as to compare to an entire work of fiction. I expected to follow the lives of a few characters, people I'd know well by the album's end.
So it's too bad that I listened to the whole thing with that expectation in mind. Because this is a wonderful, interesting work -- no doubt built along unified themes and images -- but it's no novel.
I could happily settle, though, for a collection of short stories, told alt.country-style. Stories heavy on roots, heavy on liquor, heavy on screwing up and heavy on learning lessons. Stories speckled by the jewels of Alaska place names: Nelchina, Jim Creek, the Butte. Stories of love lost.
The songwriting on "Ten Day Bender" honors the narrative form only country music can: A young man escapes a troubled family but perishes working on a crab boat, his final thought resting on the teary face of the girl he left; a boy befriends the wrong crowd, skips school, does time, plunges into addiction but surfaces later; a drug dealer boasts about a transaction that will make him rich, or so he hopes.
The s
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