Lives

iTunes Review

Alabama’s Dan Sartain is five albums into a musical career sprung from the pomade and garage fumes of ‘60s punk and rockabilly. His commercial debut, Dan Sartain & The Serpientes, was a blast of breathless, hard-rocking tunes while the follow-up, Join Dan Sartain, toned things down a shade, and even earned the artist two Top Twenty Indie hits in the U.K. For Lives, Sartain treads ground between those two releases, serving up a number of tunes that are greasy and grinding, while others are made of smoother stuff, reminiscent of ‘60s AM radio. The sparse, loping “Praying for a Miracle,” the Link Wray-inspired “Ruby Carol,” and the Spaghetti Western-flavored “Bad Things Will Happen” all deliver the goods with an accessible, stripped-down sound, but a truckload of other tunes, like “Bohemian Grove,” “Walk Among the Cobras” and “Voo Doo” stir up a more menacing vibe, redolent of psych-rock touchstones nearly a half-decade old that inspired everyone from the Lyres to the Hives. Sartain does a real service to the rock tropes of yore that are so deserving of preservation, and adds his own tattooed stamp of authenticity at the same time.