Apparently singer Mariah Cherem has a history with two of the guys from the formerly single-selling Von Bondies, and personally I think she got the sweet end of that deal. The Avatars live in a parallel or similar vein of music, but still have their indie creditability intact. Not that I'm saying this new record won't be in car commercials soon, it's a perfect fit for selling 70s era black Cadillacs, but I think if The Avatars break into fame and fortune, they won't be able to rely on chorus lines that make you want to do a bunch of crack and then go stock-car racing.

The Avatars are more conservative, guttural, sultry, with rough edges that somehow go down smooth, baring a certain amount of conventional rock attitude. Their sound is Motor City all the way. Within the album, there is a blues-rock sensibility, but it never spills over into anything really soupy or morose.

I would go so far as to say I detect a little distance, a little irony, in the music. This might be the downside of retro-rock, but popular music has always thrived on disjointed, possibly cheeky, and usually unspoken, references to bygone days. If I needed to put a date on when this album might have first appeared I would say 1978.

However, in that point in history it would have been more difficult for a five-some with three women to get serious attention from the music press (though for certain that’s still an issue as any Women/Gender/Queer Studies major will tell you). And of course, rock wouldn’t be rock without a certain sex appeal, whether it's girls or guys.

The lyrics seem to deal well with the issue of rock from a women's point of view, and not in the sometimes unfortunately naive way The Donnas have tried. There are songs about love and politics in a style you might expect from a well-heeled, artistically mature band.

My go-to tracks are "Never a Good Time", if just for the piano part, "Hey Girls", and "Warm", for its narrative about a mysterious homicide.