Back in the mid '80s, there was this band from St. Paul who toiled away on the college circuit for years before ever earning a mainstream record contract, and when they did, they continued playing the same tough, hard-earned rock and roll, with their grungy guitars, their weary-voiced singer, their California harmonies, their pop melodies, their punk-structured songs, and their lyrics of tumultuous relationships. That group never hit the big time: they never had a single reach the Top 40 (or Top 100 for that matter), they naever had an album make it past 100, and they never achieved national recognition. What they did do was soldier on for over a decade, releasing album after album of great rock and roll, influencing scores of other bands with similar leanings. The Star Spangles...are not this band (The Replacements are, though).
What The Star Spangles are, though, is one of the bands greatly influnced by The Replacements, and the influence is so great that if you didn't know better, you'd swear this was one of those great, lost Replacement records, because doggone if it doesn't sound exactly like them.
Dosn't matter to me, though, 'cause a great record is a great record, no matter who makes it, why they made it, or what record it sounds like, and "Which of the Two of Us Is Gonna Burn This House Down" is a great record: it's got just about as phenomenal an opening as I've ever heard on a rock song, with the guitar and drums both crashing twice (very Who-like), announcing something of impending importance, and what's important in this song is a crumbling relationship, the guitar/drum combo either announcing the beginning of a fight, the end of the relationship, or the singer trying one last time to reconcile the relationship before it's too late. Singer Ian Wilson's voice conveys the urgency of the moment: it's ragged, it's passionate, it's breathless. He rushes through the words because they don't matter as much as the emotion beneath.
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