The Throes [Vinyl]
''San Francisco's gritty bards deliver timeless stories of desperation on stunning debut. Pulling their name from a James Joyce story not only speaks to Two Gallants' ambition, but to their lived-in, timeless sound. These folk-punk troubadours, Adam Stephens (guitar/vocals/harmonica) and Tyson Vogel (drums) began their journey in 2002 playing impromptu gigs outside San Francisco's public transportation terminals. The band's desperately emotive debut, 'The Throes', is the stuff rail riders and Kerouac would have rave about, delivered in a drunken Pogues-meet-Dylan-on-amphetamines mess of wonder. Songs like 'My Madonna' and 'Nothing To You' highlight Stephen's ability to craft rustic tales of life at the bottom of America's food chain, heavy on the drinking and heavy on the regret. Pour a drink and try to keep your tears out of it. --Aaron Kayce/Paste''If rock music is all about transience, how can a song born decades ago still rev up the engines of romance? 'Tangled Up in Blue', for instance, is a tale of fading love, but the power and significance of the song itself is timeless. Rock 'n' roll is often an expression of youth or youth's passing, but when music (or any art) endures, its magnetism is only amplified with the passage of years. For that reason, and because the best songs are usually pinned by the listener to some quintessential moment, the classics become classic. Passion is a fleeting feeling, but the best art will evoke that feeling with every exposure. So when youth produces a work of such force, when the raw or supposedly naïve artist comes up with something universal, critics and fans rejoice. We want to latch on to a beautiful thing before its green genius withers under the glare of success. Such is the case with Two Gallants' debut The Throes. The San Francisco duo responsible for this gut-wrenching musical tragedy both just turned 21, yet somehow their musical hindsight extends far beyond recent memory and taps into a rusty vein swollen with grief, heartache and violent desperation.'' --Jonathan Zwickel/Pitchfork