Take “I Believe in You”: Its Kinks-y acoustic guitars have an immediacy and sweetness to them that a less confident artist might deliver with slower, more dramatic import, as if to ensure we understand this is meant to be “the emotional song.” Not Thomas, who slams out his riffs with as much funky verve as any of his more headbanging workouts, practically drooling out his “I don’t careee”s in the verse before launching us to the chorus with a perfectly timed burp. His carefree delirium captures the raucous interplay of a much more practiced band entirely on his own. On “Same Problems,” he boogies his way around a riff whose strings snap and sizzle, rhyming “Cadillac” with “biting my sack” in a fake Southern drawl as if he were a mini Mick Jagger before laconically bragging about how he’s “got a really fast car that goes really fast” over “Priveleged”’s cruising power-pop.
Aughties genres are getting dug out of the garbage left and right these days, though it’s only been fairly recently that we’ve started to see garage-rock revival getting a revival of its own. And while there are notes of the Hives, the Fratellis, and other “the” bands in the porridge here, Thomas’ sticky, up-close production doesn’t sound borne from the kind of dingy basements Ty Segall and Jay Reatard were playing as much as the insular world of his own headphones. The itch he’s scratching is more Daryl Johns-shaped, or even (dare I say it) Ariel Pink, and it’s not just because we have firsthand evidence of Thomas laying his tracks down one instrument at a time in his pajamas. His vocal performance evokes a kind of playacting, as on “Carry On,” where he rushes through his first verse as quickly as possible so he can spend the rest of the song howling through one seemingly endless pre-chorus, drawing out his snarling harmonies and using his own panted breaths to keep time.
It all makes for a surprisingly consistent ride, though Awesome does run into some Side B blues. His more Rapture-y detours in the title track and “Loving You (is the Easy Way)” sacrifice Thomas’ knack for airtight dynamics in favor of full-on dance-punk stampedes that, while energetic, end up getting lost in the fuzz (the Southern rock stomps of “High as Fuck” and “Cars” fare better at conjuring images of beer cans getting crushed in parking lots). Thomas also occasionally peppers in some cursory sociopolitical commentary that scans as punching above his weight—“Gamble it all away on DraftKings/’Cause in America, we don’t feel the sting” isn’t exactly “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” When he drills down on his meticulously sloppy sense of craft, though, it’s easy to giggle along with his freewheeling tribute to gleefully dumb rock salvation. Time will tell if he’s really ready to take the party out of his bedroom, but for a silly slice of pimply-faced riffage, Awesome’s charms are no fabrication.
