The Drugboy Tapes

With a 30-day window to return gear bought with a "borrowed" credit card, young wannabe rock stars Jeff Whalen and Dan Kern were on a mission in 1998 to record the songs they had been kicking around for a few months. Those tunes were a winning mixture of shimmering power pop, strutting glam rock, and non-cliched alternative rock that eventually became the basis of Tsars self-titled debut album. The two guys called in favors from friends for more gear as needed while fighting off a faltering 8-track recorder and racing to the finish line with one goal in mind: scoring a record deal. These tapes have circulated before in less official channels, but Omnivores 2025 release of The Drugboy Tapes is their official coming out party, and its a blast to hear the polished tracks from their album in scruffy, less pristine, and formative iterations. If they didnt have higher aspirations, the band could have released the album as is and it would have been on par with any concurrent Elephant 6 release, or they could have been slotted as GBVs bratty younger cousins. The lack of studio gloss certainly gives tracks like "Silver Shifter" and "I Dont Wanna Break-Up," which blared like clarions on the finished album, some nice lo-fi scrape appeal. "Kathy Fong Is the Bomb" sounds like Green Day in the basement next door, "The Glower" -- which, with some lyrical shifts and loads more guitar processing, became "Calling All Destroyers" -- is wonderfully clunky, and the two songs that didnt make the cut for the album are actually pretty great. The smoothly swaying ballad "Sun of Light" would have been a nice slow-dance addition, while the chiming power-pop rocker "Holdin Out" is Kerns noble attempt to encroach on Matthew Sweets melancholy-tune-with-monster-guitars territory. Hearing this demo years after the fact, its clear to see why a major label snapped them up and just as unclear why they didnt make it big. One cant change the past, one can only revisit it -- and in the case of Tsar, celebrate the heck out of it. The Drugboy Tapes is a very entertaining look back at the formation of one of the great unloved and underrated bands of the alternative era. ~ Tim Sendra