Rye Coalition

w/Golden, the Blood Brothers, New Luck Toy
Fri Aug 16, Graceland, $8.

The 1986 documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot was perfect--not because outdated mullets and mustaches are funny (which they are), and not because the level of inebriation caught on tape is off the Breathalyzer scale. John Heyn and Jeff Krulik's spotlight on a Judas Priest tailgate party is great because it shows rock fans at their prime. The fans are so goddamn excited, you'd think they were in a hospital expecting their firstborn to arrive instead of anticipating the unlocking of stadium doors. Their enthusiasm is palpable and real, and if every show brought that much excitement from a crowd, we might not be so hooked on antidepressants in this country.

You don't have to wait for a big touring metal show to squeeze out enthusiasm from people, though. There are plenty of acts that take their talent seriously but "loosen the execution" just the right amount to allow some fun into the rock arena. Jersey City's Rye Coalition have been around since 1995, heightening the rock 'n' roll rush by coupling an intensely tightly wound sound with a smart-ass sense of humor about making music.

"For a while we got pegged with this scumbag image, and I can't pinpoint why that is," admits Rye frontman Ralph Cuseglio. "But we're also very tongue-in-cheek about what we do, and that's important," adds the brains behind such song titles as "The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God," "Nothing Like a Clean Ashtray," and "Romancing the Italian Horn." "We're not trying to fuck shit up and be like Mötley Crüe and do as many drugs as possible. If we could meet somewhere in the middle and maybe indulge in [the rock stereotypes] to some degree without being a hypocrite, that's our happy medium."

Despite their lens on crusty rock standbys, Rye's musical style isn't bland '70s retread. It's more progressive and dissonant, a volatile punk quake produced by Steve Albini and sparked by acts like Drive Like Jehu and Fugazi--but developing more over time with classic rock's elongated guitar solos, gruff vocals, and easily recognizable lexicon, as shown on "Stairway to the Free Bird on the Way to the Smokey Water" (off 2002's On Top). Their music is a hybrid of the old and the new, a complicated coupling that wrestles with fusing elements of cock rock within songs that take the older genre's sacred cows to task.

One such, er, cow is the ode to the female groupie--something countless acts slap "baby" and "mama" all over and call a song about love. But Cuseglio admits the wise-ass approach isn't always so cut and dried for the band: "With [1999's Lipstick Game], I tried to poke a lot of fun [at rock stereotypes], but it's also hard to function outside of that," he admits. "Like I could sing a song about how ridiculous the whole groupie power dynamic is, and then after a show be totally involved in some conversation with a girl, so it's kinda strange. It's one thing to really be cognizant of those stereotypes, [but] it's also kinda hard to function outside of them completely, maybe because they're so engrained in what people perceive as what rock is supposed to be."

Fortunately, Rye have always positioned themselves as a multidimensional act, and after seven years of dealing with the members' scholastic careers, geographical distances, and countless other setbacks, they're ready to live up to their latest album title and be on top of their game. Their new attitude is best exemplified on the cover of On Top, which shows the five members flying over the Jersey City gates. "That area of New Jersey gets so much slack, especially from people in Manhattan, because it's so close to New York City," Cuseglio explains. "Maybe that attitude is true of our music too. For a long time we've felt like there were certain decisions we made as a band that [might have held us back] when we watched a lot of bands that weren't that good get really popular. Like [Jersey City], we were, you know, the underdogs." Cuseglio laughs, and adds of the image, "It was kind of an homage."

by Jennifer Maerz