Grand Champeen

about

If Grand Champeen's sophomore album Battle Cry for Help was an earnest, somewhat quixotic attempt by four ardent students of rock to demonstrate what they've learned from forefathers as venerated as the Rolling Stones and the Replacements, The one that brought you is the wee-hours afterparty where the grades aren't in yet and the drunken graduates no longer give a shit. You can hear this not-giving-a-shit in the tangled snarl of squealing feedback and excited cries that is this album's opener, a power-pop nugget tossed off with so little regard for its own perfection that it nearly tumbles into thrilling chaos more than once before each band member suddenly lurches into a last-ditch dash to see who can finish the song first. You can hear it in the cheekily rad riffs that adorn nearly every song and are wrenched out with such offhand ferocity that they recall the MC5 anticipating Thin Lizzy. You can hear it in "One and Only," a spot-on radio-ready ballad that has been slammed to tape so hot it sounds like it's coming out of a rapidly melting AM radio. But in the process of having a good time and rocking like they don't give a shit, these four alumni of "Grand Champeen…courageous, fighting and brave" (as taken from this album's penultimate track, a fight song entitled "Alma Mater") also happen to have created the album that most faithfully documents their live show, a sloshed bacchanal of towering riffage and throat-shredding screams that the band has slowly honed in grimy div

top songs

albums

Battle Cry For Help

The One That Brought You

Dial T For This

▥

Almost You: The Songs Of Elvis Costello

Dial "T" For This

▥

SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artist

Out Front by the Van

▥

Almost There Records Turn 4

▥

live on KUT Radio

▥

All God's Kids, They Wanna Rock

▥

Almost There Turn 1

▥

Soul Asylum Tribute, 7th Street Entry, Mpls, MN 4-14-06

similar artists