Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe
I just returned from a vacation on which I spent five days tooling around Reno and Tahoe, gambling and hiking and slumming. While I was hanging at a bar in the sometimes bleak, sometimes scuzzy, but mostly offbeat Reno, the Catheters song "I Fall Easy" came on. From the 2002 full-length Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days, "I Fall Easy" is a sinister, heavy-on-the-floor-tom jam in the same vein as the Murder City Devils and their brethren. It's sleazy and trudgy, crisp on the guitar licks, and heavy on the cracked-vocal sass. And it seems perfectly apropos that a long-extinct (and maybe forgotten) rock 'n' roll band from early-aughts Sub Pop was being spun at a Reno bar—a peculiar choice of soundtrack for a peculiar land.