Customer Reviews

Tsar

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Just when you thought rock didn't matter at all ... Hail Tsar, the outrageous LA punk-pop-rock band that makes you want to throw bricks through the police station windows and pound a hole in the dashboard. After more than a year of thrilling Hollywood, the band's debut LP is better than we could have imagined. Beautiful, savage songs, thick with hooks and searing guitars, locomotive bass and staggering drums. It sounds like a combination of Clash anthems, Ziggy Stardust scuz, Replacements' hope, Nirvana violence, T.Rex groove, ELO pop, Guns n Roses' swagger ... all processed and infected by some sort of Martian revolutionaries in 2057 and beamed back to a beach party that turns freakish, lasers and sirens and tidal waves and teen girls dancing around a bonfire of $100 bills. "Gurl Who Wouldn't Die" is the secret weapon, a final track of lush broken lust that will be the slow-dance prom song of 2001. Everything that comes before is huge, loud, from another time. This record will start 10,000 rock bands.

I like Tsar because they make me wanna smile. I can't smile cuz my teeth are all cracked and fuzzy.

I like Tsar because their rock makes me tap my feet. The bottoms of my feet are all cracked and fuzzy, too - crank is a rough and tumble mistress!

I like Tsar cuz Danny-boy Kern is from Chico and it's about time a GREAT band (besides Deathstar, of course) emerged from the musical wasteland that is Chico, California.

I like Tsar becuz they rhyme with gee-tar. And that's just damned neat.

I like Tsar because they sing "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-LA" and bands don't do that much anymore.

I like Tsar because they have more noodles in their songs than I have (uncracked) teeth.

I like Tsar cuz when I listen to 'The Girl Who Wouldn't Die' it reminds me of playing the Journey game on my Atari when I was wee.

I like Tsar just because I like Tsar so there you ninnypants.

Tsar! Buy it and listen. Return to rock. Listen to the symphonies of So CAL beaches, occult choirs, starry mirages of tangled constellations, the harps of a few boys crazed imaginations. These leaders/saviors of Post-modern Youth, both innocent and raging, re-pave and break apart the crashing plains of their very own Creations, tumultuous worlds! Of chaos and life! God and Satan at battle in a disc of colors spinning just above the head! Without this album many bands to come would not be allowed to explore the forgotten pathologies of a larger people, a pathology of love enforcement, grace through destruction, hypnotic surges, monstrosity and technology. The fantasies these boys cultivate DO INDEED contain that mysterious power which is precisely FREEDOM'S, GOD'S and AMERICA'S - a mysterious power which gives THE KIDS a new direction, a light and a sound forever exciting to the flesh of the heart. (! )

Tsar will launch 10,000 bands? I doubt it. But never before has a derivative band wrapped so many perfect Bowie and Replacements and even Stones-esque sounds into such a singularly pretty package. Thank god, the sum total of these influences somehow doesn't lend Tsar a tired post-modern, ironic, borrowed sound at all -- rather, this is earnest, honest, and forthright rock from a band that seems to mean every note it plays and every word it sings. This is courageous stuff in today's music circus, full of "safe" and bashful sounds hiding behind a curtain of irony and distance, and I pray this isn't the last we'll hear from Tsar. I hope the band will continue to live up to its glorious debut, which will remain at the top of my music heap for many years to come, and their coming success doesn't go to their heads. That would be a shame: the world needs a tsar.

Being the classic rock fan that I am, I am often reluctant to open up my ears to newer, modern music. Until recently my CD collection consisted mainly of Queen, Boston, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, etc. But this revelation of Tsar brought me to terms with what could possibly be a new era in music. I'm not sure if that even made sense, but hear me out anyway. .... I was given a band name and a small picture of the lead singer by a friend and I was determined to find out what they were all about. Boy am I glad I did. I was surprised to find that this quartet from Hollywood, California that started off on tour with Duran Duran, was actually worth listening to. My skeptical attitude has been formed over years of listening to countless bands that have never caused me to do anything but yawn and change the radio station. I have never been more happy and hopeful for a band than for Tsar. My synopsis of the album is that it is one filled with energetic, high power tunes, with an inspirational 'rock on and rock hard' message. The opening track "Calling All Destroyers" is a call to arms against whatever makes the youth of America so angry and bored. I must say that it is one of my favorites on the album. The second track "I Don't Wanna Break-Up" is a frustrated, and questioning tune about a guy who wants to work things out in a troubled relationship. Other tracks like "Kathy Fong Is The Bomb" and "The Teen Wizards" are filled with energy and addictively catchy tunes that cause inevitable subconscious foot tapping or at least an amused chuckle. The two more ballady tracks on the album, "Ordinary Gurl" and "The Girl Who Wouldn't Die" have more of a melancholy sound, and "The Girl Who Wouldn't Die" seems almost nostalgic. I highly recommend this album to anyone who enjoys the happier, less serious side of rock. This music is definitely a picker upper and has totally changed my attitude about new bands. In the future, I will definitely be more open to a new band just coming on the scene. ....

I was with some friends and my girlfriend said, "Get off that Rage album and listen to this!" So I said whatever man! so she put me onto Tsar, my new favorite band, but favorite is not the right word for it. I expect something more like INCOMPARABLE (god is kind of wondering too as he smokes a fat one and plays it's riffs) Now, I have to buy this album and let it crucify my ego, a profound gift! Tsar is a poet and also a rocker! love, Pierre

I first heard TSAR as background music on the late lamented FOX series FreakyLinks. What I heard, I REALLY liked! I had to have this album!This album is the greatest and has rarely strayed far from my CD player in 5 years. Tracks 1-7 magically flow together and take you on a "feel good" high, a joyride that never gets old. This is the type of music that should be pouring from the radio.Track 8 slows down slightly for the thoughtful Ordinary Gurl then we're right back at it with Track 9, Disappear. Things finish off with one of my favorites from the album, Track 10, The Girl Who Wouldn't Die.Listen to the samples here at Amazon. If you like what you hear, buy this album at any price. You'll never regret it.Why didn't Hollywood Records do right by these guys? I'm a Green Day fan as well and I've watched their music develop and mature. Musically TSAR is so much more mature with their first album than Green Day's Dookie ever was but I feel a lack of enthusiasm from Hollywood Records have kept TSAR in near obscurity.That's all about to change TSAR is back with a new record label and their long awaited second album to be released this June.Get ready, hold on tight, this summer TSAR is back!!!

Tsar was a band that appeared and vanished without a trace after one good album, how they slipped through the cracks is still a mystery to me. After all, the sound is just an improved version of overexposed garbage like Simple Plan or New Found Glory, especially due to their crack producer Rob Cavallo (of Green Day - Dookie fame, the touchstone of 90's pop punk). This CD has more backing vocals, guitar histrionics, and better hooks all around than pretty much anything else done in this style, resulting in a few amazing tunes. It also helps that the vocals remind me more of a Taime Downe (Faster Pussycat) styled cackle than the phony Brit sneer of bands like Good Charlotte.

Best Tracks:
"Calling All Destroyers" - Gimmicky and hooky...pop punk made for the space age.
"I Don't Wanna Break Up" - Hopefully this will be revered as a power pop classic, just a notch below "Surrender" (it's THAT good!)
"Kathy Fong Is The Bomb" - Don't know what this is about, but it's got one heck of a hook.
"Teen Wizards" - Gotta love the F-word in the ballad intro (Starting Over, anyone?) and the punky chorus is simple and effective.

Where have these guys been? Where has this music been my whole life? Buy this record immediately. Then spend the next few hours wondering how you were able to get this far in your life without it. This stuff rocks. Rocks so hard as to be nearly a hazard to your central nervous system. Listen to this record and you may need to see a chiropractor.

God bless Tsar and their holy work...

In the late '70's many bands concerned themselves with reconciling the melodic standard that the Beatles set at the beginning of the decade with the unbridled energy of punk. Cheap Trick and Peter Frampton are now considered "rock", (or maybe even *ugh* "classic rock") but aspects of what those bands did eventually evolved into "power pop". Tsar modernizes that punky pop approach that Cheap Trick was known for in their heyday. The operative word is energy. Add Jeff Whalen, a lead singer that owes as much to Billy Corrigan as he does to Billie Joe, and a polished wall of guitar that would make Boston proud and Oasis drool, and you get the epitome of the modern ideal of "power pop".

At the heart of any "pop" project, though, there has to be a song, and Tsar delivers admirably in this department. If you smashed down the sparkling wall of guitar, I have little doubt that Tsar would not be out of place in a smoky club with their hooky songs and hyperactive enthusiasm. Song after song convinces. On one listen I was sold on "Silver Shifter", but pretty much every song I experienced after continued to impress me. Unusually, this first impression has stuck with me in the months since I bought it. "Calling All Destroyers" is a devastating opener, and the next five songs are perfectly programmed. "Ordinary Gurl" is a great rock anthem, and "The Girl Who Wouldn't Die" is a great closer. Even the least convincing songs, "Monostereo" and "Disappear", are still very infectious.

The Lowdown: Tsar is another great out-of-print find. Get is used: It will be the best $4 you have spent on a CD in a LONG time. Although Tsar is not blatantly retro in the sense that Imperial Drag was, they certainly recall the golden days when people actually got on stage, wrote good songs and played them with each other for fun. Summer's coming, and it sounds great with the windows down!