I appreciate The Sweet Things for keeping a fading style—dingy glam classic rock—alive. They do it well here. The riffs are clean and good. The drums are confident enough to play around in the space, pulling back and jumping forward at the right times. The vocals are objectively good. However, I would say it’s done a bit too well most of the time and not well enough at other points. The sound is pretty formulaic and therefore it sounds familiar but that means the sound is generic overall. On the other hand, the music is not as dirty as you would expect. A song with a title like “Cocaine Asslicker Blues” should, bare minimum, sound like taking shots of whiskey at 1 AM in a dive bar in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Instead, it’s sipping gin in a faux-speakeasy on main street in any-town California before dinner at 6 PM. Again, not bad but nothing terribly new. Sometimes it sounds like a movie producer’s wet dream for the bar party scene in a movie. –Nicole X (Spaghetty Town)