“Japanese Girls”
from the album Tree City
2005
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So much of the New York rock scene is about looking cool that it’s almost a surprise to find a band that puts music before style. Robbers on High Street is that band.
The quartet, transplanted to the city from Poughkeepsie, teased rock fans last year with Fine Lines, a phenomenal EP of six smart, compact songs that stayed away from the slick, self-consciously fashionable sound of its contemporaries. The same sensibility reigns on Tree City, the Robbers’ full-length debut.
 Robbers on High Street |
That’s not to say there’s no style to Robbers on High Street — there’s plenty. The band’s songs set gritty guitars alongside subtle piano parts for a dirtied-up sound that owes as much to the Beatles as to any obscure indie-rock influence. The group fashions huge musical hooks and lays them, glittering and dangerous, in songs that architects should study for their airtight construction. A bold guitar riff drives “Japanese Girls,“ and the rhythmic piano on “Beneath the Trees” yields to a quick, punchy guitar solo.
Instead of singing about late-night cocaine binges and how bored he is, vocalist Ben Trokan sounds as if he’s still sorting out his place in the overwhelming metropolis where he now lives. He muses on “Descender” about the in-between stage when you’re not quite comfortable where you are but it’s too late to turn back. He braces himself for the unfamiliar on “Bring on the Terror” and sings about that special anonymity unique to a city with 10 million people on “Hudson Tubes.”
It’s a condition he and his band mates won’t be living with for much longer. These Robbers could well end up on 2005’s most-wanted lists.