Are You Green?

Album Review

Detroit's Sights play a high-spirited brand of aggressive '60s-pop, garage rock, and Brit-inspired psych, drawing on a transmogrified gene-splice of British freakbeat, new wave/punk, and rock influences, including the early Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Who, the Creation, the Yardbirds, the Jam, and the Buzzcocks. Guitarist Eddie Baranek — whose rousing lead vocal talent seems unusually sharp for his age — and bassist Mark Leahey formed the Sights at the beginning of their senior year of high school, but the real surprise here is relative newcomer Eugene Strobe, who approaches his drum kit like a man possessed by the vodka-drenched spirit of the Who's Keith Moon. With songs like "All Night Long Stay," "She's Not the One," and "That Ain't Right Little Girl," the Sights have become one of the greater late-90's bands of the Detroit area — other include the Go, Outrageous Cherry, the Witches, and the White Stripes — who seem to be putting the Motor City back on the musical map. Incidentally, "Sorry" features a recording of two members of the band, armed with baseball bats, who are smashing a computer terminal to pieces after it was thrown out of an upstairs window. Fall of Rome Records in Los Angeles re-issued the album in 2001.