The Gnomes 
Aussie throwback upstarts The Gnomes first surfaced here in solo guise as the project of the band’s songwriter Jay Millar, simply dubbed Gnome. Millar tapped into the raw bite of rock when it was fresh from the forge, tracing the unbuttoning of the genre from the first moment that Dave Davies slashed up an amp and crusted rock with something a bit more ragged. A year or so on, Millar’s still mining the back pages of the ‘60s for his inspriation, but the band’s been fleshed out to a four-piece and sounding all the more robust for the move. Like the early EPs, the band’s debut time warps the quartet back to epicenter of the Nuggets-ere. The record filters through a dozen shades of strum and scratch that could have easily been folded in among the comp’s best moments, fooling the most ardent crate digger.
There’s no shortage of bands lionizing the past, but more often these days it’s watery psych-pop and bedroom-born versions of JK and Co. There’s little softness in the mix, and even fewer psychedelics on Introducing… The Gnomes. The band captures the pre-Summer of Love explosion from suit-matched manners to winking hijinks that slipped fuzztone into the living room and onto the family stereo. As evidenced by the band’s vid for “Flippin’ Stomp,” they’ve got the soul of The Monkees in ‘em, and with it, Nesmith’s knack for pushing the needle on pop’s boundaries. Musically, though the band skews closer to the haggard heat of the garage beat — pre-concept-era Kinks, The Animals at their most un-coiffed, or The Guess Who in their shaggy early years. The Gnomes succeed best when they suture the softness to the scorch, lacing deceptively sweet harmonies over the amp-fried din of “I Like It,” or the quasi-power pop of “I’m Not The One.” The band’s debut is a record dipped in a love for classic aesthetics, but infused with the ragged youth, and unapologetic zeal that always made garage pop vital. Snag an early listen to the whole record below, the album is out tomorrow, November 7th from Dog Meat Records.