Tijuana Panthers - Wayne Interest

So I’m scouting through the review pages and in complete and utter error I press Wayne Interest by Tijuana Panthers. After a scoot through their scant website and a rigorous search through Wiki (which let me down bigtime), I can only fathom out that it’s three blokes from the good old US of A set up with drums, guitar and bass.

This seems to be their second album for IL Records and clocks in with a hefty 14 tracks. Steeped in a love of surf guitar, indie-rock and what seems like a collection of Hot Hot Heat albums, it’s away with the fairies on energetic opener ‘Four Horsemen’. 

The guitar is incessantly spikey, full of poke, angles and twists and turns. The licks are similar in approach to Parquet Courts. It’s fair to say that the current crop of indie upstarts from across the pond owe a large amount of debt to the punk, C86 indie and the itchy aggression of The Fall.

‘Torpedo’ runs a shadow to ‘Four Horsemen’, Duane Eddy six-string and jangle, and the only decipherable word is the title, barked over the toms and bass drums. It tails off to the opening bars of The Primitives ‘Crash’ and is a hedonistic guitar rush.

It’s fair to say that a large proportion of the songs on Wayne Interest are of parallel ilk, all driving songs with no sign of any let-up. But the bonus comes in the fact that the songs have slightly deferred nuances which come stamped with their own individual charm. If it’s not got the strong arm, rapid-fire delivery of ‘Fired’, it’s got the stroppy strumpet stood-up simplicity of ‘Sooner or Later’. It’s only when we get to ‘NOBO’ that the pace relents and “Where you get your money?” beats a sinister refrain.

The band even come up trumps with their mock horror cover of Buzzcocks ‘Everybody's Happy Nowadays’. It’s scruffy, ramshackle, screeching, but has a cuddly charm all the same. If you like your indie pretension-free, ripped with a frenetic pace and deep-seated in the sharp suited elements of punk rock then you’ll welcome Wayne Interest with open arms.