The Old House - Weekend Driver

The call “gimme indie rock” went out and, rather belatedly but bloody joyously, the answer came in the form of Weekend Driver by The Old House, which gloriously revels in its hybrid of triumphant fist-pumping guitar rock and scuzzed-up crunchy American underground guitar noise.

Weekend Driver is propelled by the kind of joie de vivre that suggests it was written on a particularly good day in the history of Boston indie rock. It has the Boston hallmarks of the times when the Lemonheads got it right (more shouting than pouting, equal parts melody and maelstrom) and when Big Dipper first unleashed their savage beauty in 1987 (if you can find it, buy the All Going Out Together single; both that and the debut album Heavens aren’t difficult to find going cheap in second-hand shops…they really should have got the respect they deserve by now, but no one ever said pop music was fair).

Of course, calling your band The Old House and being on the Louder Than Bombs label invites Smiths comparisons, and while they do share some of that band’s classic pop nous, you’d be better served by looking closer to The Old House’s Wakefield home and listening to Leeds band The Edsel Auctioneer’s rambunctious debut from 1989, Our New Skin, to capture the raucous, boisterous pleasures of Weekend Driver.