[A brand new feature on this blog, since I find myself listening to some new or newish music nearly every day, and miss the days when the newspapers I wrote for would run record reviews by the dozens. A clarification: The Rock Gods serial is fiction, but this section rocks for real.)

Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose (on the Oh Wow Dang label, http://thosedarlins.com)

I downloaded this into my iPod without hearing it first—having, in fact, never heard of this three-fourths female band before, though I now learn they’ve been around four years or so and that this is their second full-length. When the songs started appearing on shuffle, it never occurred to me that this was a contemporary pop/rock band from Nashville. I thought these were loose tracks from one of the many New England indie comps I have from the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s high praise in my book to be mistaken for what I consider the golden age of indie music. The raw vocals, everything-mixed-up-front production and occasional tricky girl-group harmonies are just captivating. “Hives” has everything—a Buzzcocks pace, Merseybeat melodies, vocals that sound straight off old comps like Girls in the Garage, a guitar solo that has to fight through those vocals to break out (and does, for exactly the right amount of time). “Fatty Needs a Fix” is even better, so Britpunk you feel the safety pins and hear the sirens. There’s a goofiness and giddiness on this album that you can’t make up, and which a lot of dumb producers deliberately try to subdue. The twangy accents and heavy strumming proclaim the Nashville roots, but this is universal darlin rock, fitting right in with the coastal extremes of the Runaways and the Shangri-Las.