Labels: Tiny Engines
Review by: MH
Red Collar come from Durham in North Carolina and play blue collar rock. The rock, the lyrics and storytelling style of the songs are clearly strongly influenced by Bruce Springsteen. Some of the lyrics are fairly blatant imitations – see “The Old Piano Roll”, for example. The vocals are quite hoarse and distinctive which is a good thing. The opening track isn’t bad – it has some bite to it and is a fairly rousing anthem. Later on, “This House” is a bit of a stadium ballad which wouldn’t be out of place on MTV. It’s far from terrible but quite bland at times and for the most part this is some fairly routine Springsteen worship. Whether you like this or not will depend entirely on your take on punks doing their Springsteen thing.