Where past discs often sounded like Buddy Holly-era roots-rock, here, the Spanics snap off Fender lines that owe equally to The Beatles’ Revolver and Buck Owens’ The Carnegie Hall Concert, coming off like some lost ’60s garage band with the chops to match its enthusiasm.Ĭelebrating their 20th anniversary as a band (and 38th as father and son), the Spanic Boys serve up a dozen originals on Sunshine, their eighth album, on their own Cinaps label, with plenty of tasty guitar from father Tom and son Ian.
Wherever these guys take the sound, though, in the end, it still sounds like a Spanic Boys record, each track boasting some truly heroic guitar work, from the stately southern rock-meets-Memphis-soul vibe of “What Will You Do?” to the headier psychadelic trip they take on “Secret” and the title cut.įrom USA Today: Milwaukee father-and-son guitarslingers Ian and Tom Spanic, who’ve performed together now for 20 years, always bring a sense of cross-generational joy to their too-rare releases. Then there’s the Beatlesque ache of “When The Night Has Come,” fueled by the strum of acoustic guitars. On “Didn’t Love You Anyway” they rock like a ’60s garage band covering Larry Williams, with a solo as trashy as anything this side of those earliest Kinks hits. “Secret” takes that psychadelic flashback in an even trippier direction, adding Tex-Mex organ, vocals that feel like they come with a lava lamp, and a solo suggesting what Roger McGuinn might’ve played if he’d recorded this one on the morning after “Eight Miles High.” Take the title cut, a hazy psychadelic rocker that almost comes off as a sequel to the Beatles “Rain,” complete with convincingly Ringo-esque drum fills and a backward guitar solo. But Sunshine also finds the family stretching out beyond the roots-rock border. And they’ve certainly mastered the fine art of coaxing the twang out of an unsuspecting Strat. From No Depression: Tom and Ian Spanic, a father-son duo whose rich harmonic blend is as sweet as the Everly Brothers crying in the rain, could pull off a roots-rocking tune here such as “Honey” or “I Hear You Talking” without even breaking a sweat.