Motel Motel

The four grievous angels who comprise Motel Motel steal the candlelight, bali hai wine, shotguns and steam trains from forlorn honky-tonkers like Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt and escape without being smothered by the alt-country label. Unlike their more direly nostalgic peers, New York-based Motel Motel imbue the gothic storytelling of their forebears with a nubile energy that suggests they're living just as hard but having more fun. Eric Engel's ecstatic tremolo invites semi-relevant comparisons to The Cave Singers and Timo Sullivan's raucous stage presence places them solidly in the aesthetic pantheon of contemporaries like Dr. Dog and Drug Rug. Literate, classic, occasionally baroque; Motel Motel isn't riding a wave or clinging stalwartly to a movement so much as they're hunkering down for a long run at rock relevance.