Remember that smile on Ryan Sambol’s face. It’s the happiest he would look all night. Photos by Joe McCabe.
Led by king guttersnipe Ryan Sambol, Austinite minstrels jingled and jangled their way through a complacently keen set on Friday evening. The four-piece — slack-shouldered and heavy-lidded under the lights — channeled their energy entirely into the capricious gait of their songs.
As the opening track on the Strange Boys’ full-length “…And Girls Club,” “Woe Is You and Me” is a bona-fide slugger. It’s likely that the group keeps the kernel “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” close to their bosoms; with the first few notes of “Woe,” the night cantered swiftly forward. Despite the limber, effulgent garage issuing forth from the stage, the reserve of the group was markedly high.
Sambol, gazing up at the lights like a moonstruck tomcat, caterwauled as blissfully as if he were alone in the shower. Philip Sambol, bassist and brother to Ryan, played as twin soul to guitarist Greg Enlow with a matching posture and plastic flower garland. Drummer Matt Hammer kept time with a straight face. After cruising through “To Turn a Tune or Two,” “This Girl Taught Me a Dance,” and “Heard You Want to Beat Me Up,” any “reserve” seemed nothing more than a clever decoy for “cool.”
With earnestness comes intimacy. The gentle mechanization of the Strange Boys’ stage presence whirred and clicked like a familiar toy. The act was predictable, yes — a faithful incarnation of their records with nary a gilded lily in sight. Nevertheless, by a layman’s assessment of the tried-and-true applause-o-meter, every shrugged chorus only served to endear the audience further. To additional fanfare, Jet Blanca of honked along on her sax to “Poem Party” and the Boys threw the crowd a bone with the brand-new “Ice Cream Sandwiches.”
“You guys like covers?” squeaked Sambol, the dreaminess pulled from his face with a brown
plastic barrette. An appreciative gurgle cut through the crowd. “CCR or Dead Moon?” continued the singer. It was fair if he wanted to test the audience with an innocent question, and with a few “WOOOs” and the tintinnibulation of several dozen beer glasses he received an answer. One can wager, with no small amount of certainty, that in any town in America, at any given moment, a crowd will choose Creedence over those — er m– small-time Dead Moon clowns. The band henceforth knocked into “Lodi” with a dutiful lope.
Was the evening a hootin’-and-hollerin’, foot-stompin’, partner-swingin’ shindig? Not quite, but close enough. Small flaws in its foundation lay primarily in the legs of the audience, whose refusal to dance was as stubborn as the will of a laden pack animal. Shouldering a negligible fraction of the blame was the cardboard-cutout cool of the band, which owed more to rumpled whimsy than to Sullivan-show whistle and pop. The real dazzler of the night was the sound: scratchy, wobbly, crackly, plaintive. Under the red and blue lights, the dusky drawl of the Strange Boys’ repertoire charmed its way across the wooden floor, and the Lord saw that it was good.
MORE PHOTOS: Mika Miko
