The Cuts

The Cuts' influences can pretty accurately be listed as the Stooges, Television, the Stones, and even a little Jefferson Airplane, but let me boil all that down for you: The band's new self-titled album (a rerelease of a limited-edition LP the Cuts put out in the '90s) is the fulfillment of an air-guitar dream. It's a sonic re-enactment of the ubiquitous white-boy rite of passage: standing on your twin bed, rocking out to a stack of your older brother's records. The unabashed bliss of that experience so pervades these tracks that you can practically see singer Andy Jordan doing his own audience-of-one version of Jagger's pee-pee-dance swagger on tracks like "Do the Sleeper." And the entire band nearly wets itself (and rightly so) when channeling the Sonics through what might just be Moby Grape on "Salt in My Wounds." While The Cuts is more Strokes than Tom Verlaine, more run-of-the-mill garage rock revival than the neo-new wave/psychedelia of 2003's 2 Over Ten, it's still a damn fine album to do a little tighty-whitey boogieing to.