Generally, we’re not into simple arrangements. Nothing gets us hotter than some Pet Sounds action - all those clever little nuances and parts and instruments that pop up for just a moment once in a song or an album. If there aren’t 13 overdubbed guitars playing backwards and four random beats on a tympani thrown in somewhere, we feel cheated. DANIEL LANOIS WOULD NEVER ALLOW THIS! MUST BE A DEMO! But that’s the problem, as over the years we have spent more and more of our time plugged into recordings that were done by necessity on the fast and the cheap - where compositions aren’t much more than well recorded demos - we’ve come to really fall in love with recordings that weren’t. Sour Notes’ Meat of the Fruit, Papermoons’ New Tales and Powerhouse’s Yeah! come to mind as the sort of well produced releases that combine good engineering with equally meritous songwriting. But they’re all fairly ornate, and pretty far from notions of three-chords-and-the-truth bliss that comprises the larger part of the Rock and Roll cannon.

We’d lost sight of what a solid, if uncomplicated in production, rock and roll record sounded like. The Gold Sounds’ EP has completely cured us of this. With its tight songwriting, robust lyricism, blinding bright guitars, occasionally fuzzy bass and rock of Jericho solid beats, this self released CDr EP packs a more rockfreshing wallup than it’s hand-made cover could ever convey. These songs, especially the first three, are WHIPS of ACES (the closer, “Parfum,” is a drunky twilight on the trail ballad - still a good listen, but nowhere near the caliber of “Champagne”, “Keep it Rolling” and likely song of the year nominee “Two Ways”). You wouldn’t think it would be so much of a novelty to hear a band executing such, frankly, uncomplicated songs so perfectly - but in our experience it is.

Now, when we say simple, we’re not positing that these are verse chorus verse songs that milk the powerchord all the way to a Chinese Dairy Factory. Rather, there just isn’t much more to it than guitar, bass, drums and vocals. Gold Sounds are about as straight ahead, full on rock and roll as you could hope for. Full of touchstones, but none so strong that you can actually put a finger on it. It feels like it’s from another era, or perhaps another universe where this particular branch of closer to the roots music did not spill out of the early 70s into a cultural current of suck. There is a temperament to what’s being done here, think of the restraint it must take, afterall, to record an album as a trio that actually comes out of the studio still sounding like a trio played it.

There are exceptions, of course. There isn’t much tempered about the vocals on the album, for example, which is a relief because this is one of those rare local records where the vocalist can not just carry a tune, but actually sing (again, this shouldn’t be such a novelty, but it is) - powerful, raw and truthful. This EP has stolen away the top spots in our unwelcome sunrise playlist, combining the desert sky pearl-snap minimalism of Eagles of Death Metal with the aluminum-siding real-talk of “It Makes You Happy” era Sheryl Crow, wrapped up in the straight ahead big riffage and steady beat of early Queens of the Stone Age. (Oh yeah, and we love all those things, especially that one really good Sheryl Crow record - whatever, we had no cred to begin with.) The Gold Sounds haven’t really gotten much in the way of the inner loop spotlight yet, and that’s probably a good thing because clearly instead of wasting their time worrying about scenes and competing metanarratives of what it means to be a musician they’ve just focused on writing songs. These are guys that sometimes play with their shirts off, but most assuredly always without a cynical irony. Again, and sadly, how refreshing. Recommended.

The Gold Sounds are playing this Saturday’s Free Press’ Westheimer Block Paty at 12:45 pm Upstairs at Avante Garden. For those that can’t make it, they’ll be playing a free show at the Scout Bar the next night.