Now this is some good punk rock! This Florida band has been kicking around for quite some time now, and have been seriously lacking in output. Thankfully, after years of waiting and anticipation, “Cheap Trinkets” shows that THE BELTONES were just honing their craft in the meantime. As a four piece, these guys get plenty of miles out of their dual attack buzzing sound, which is very guitar heavy, as well as the gravelly, smoked out vocals of their singer, Bill McFadden. You know the sound a garbage disposal makes when it’s trying to decimate a head of lettuce into fine grain? Yeah, well Mr. McFadden grumbles along with similar type “brrrrrrrrs….” He’s definitately going to regret all those cigarettes later on in life. Anyway, musically, this is very much in the same vein as the epic SWINGIN’ UTTERS album, “The Streets of San Francisco.” I really dig the lyrics on here, as they are very far from ordinary and predictable. Sure, you have your “fighting spirit” type tunes, but THE BELTONES exceed in the area of being storytellers, especially on “Garbage Picker,” and “Set ‘em Up Stevie.” On the song “Weak,” McFadden exclaims in obvious pain, “Cos I ain’t got no soul, just broken dreams and bloodstained sheets,” and that air of defeatness lingers throughout most of this disc. I’m not the biggest fan of the “street-punk” style sound, but there was a time where this was pretty much all I listened to, and thinking back to that time period, I would have worshipped “Cheap Trinkets” day and night. If you’re a fan of what TKO puts out in general, you’d be a fool not to pick this up.

TKO

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