Throwin' Rocks At The Moon
This Carolina quintet's debut studio album, "Throwin' Rocks at the Moon,"  has craft to spare. Some of the credit must go to producer Pete Anderson, who stripped  away the excess and revealed the essential core of the songs. Most of the credit, though,  must go to singer/guitarists Chip Robinson and Stephen Howell, who have written songs  full of tenderness, melancholy and joyful release and have given them vocals which  suggest as much as they state. "Hey Sheriff" has been transformed from a melodramatic  bar-band blues into a moody honky-tonk tune where the defiant confrontation with the  police is now tinged with fear and desperation. But when the Backsliders decide to rock  out, as they do on "My Baby's Gone" and the title track, they do so with an infectious  abandon that's hard to resist.--Geoffrey Himes