Talk about pointing out the obvious...it only takes one spin of the second album from Joseph Plunkett and his partners in music to figure out there's a whole lot of Y chromosome action going on here. Between the ragged honky tonk of "Like Me Better" and "Man Alone," the rowdy and beer-soaked rock of "Had It Made" and "A Day in the Sun," and the
Neil Young meets
Bob Dylan brooding of "Johnny's Song" and "Closer Than a Friend,"
The Weight Are Men sounds thoroughly guy-centric, and while women won't necessarily be frightened away by this music -- Plunkett clearly isn't afraid to show off his sensitive side while he's whooping it up -- it sounds like it was destined to be the soundtrack for some serious male bonding sessions, with plenty of cheap suds and air guitar wrangling as part of the action. The music is thankfully unpretentious, with the pronounced twang in Plunkett's vocals sounding unforced, and the band kicks up some serious dust with a lot of no-nonsense barroom rock and an extra side order of twang; even the low-key numbers show off the kind of attitude
the Rolling Stones brought to their country-influenced tracks.
The Weight Are Men is solid rock & roll from front to back, though there's something just a bit too casual in the delivery that keeps this set from being a total slam-dunk -- when a band tries this hard for a barroom ambience, they run the risk of sounding like a bar band, and that's what happens more than once on
The Weight Are Men, but they're a damn good bar band who deliver the goods for anyone who likes their twang-infused rock straight, no chaser. ~ Mark Deming