Real Rejects Not Allowed 10″
You can’t keep a good man down, and T.J. Cabot (a.k.a. Tyler Boutilier) of PHONE JERKS and NERVE BUTTON fame has been an ardent practitioner of the garage arts in various forms since the 2000s. His latest endeavor, the REAL REJECTS, is maybe his most thoroughly realized project yet. With nine tracks pressed on a 10”, Not Allowed dips into a range of raucous rock’n’roll styles, celebrating the gritty simplicity of the juiciest proto-punk, the jumped-up dynamics of 1990s budget rock, and all adjacent vibrations in between. While the STOOGES-like title track is a certain standout, the soulful “Tin Foil Hat” best manages to showcase all these sources of inspiration in a single song. These guys are indeed keepin’ it real, even if their chosen moniker sounds like they asked Chat GPT to spit out a garage punk band name.