Dan Melchior

New York-based Brit Dan Melchior has been rocking steady for years without the increasingly standard bullshit of contrived image. He’s been part of bands led by such straight-up underground garage rock heroes as Holly Golightly and Billy Childish, and has been pumping out the same with his own band, Dan Melchior’s Broke Review, since their 1999 debut, tellingly titled This Love Is Real. Melchior’s styles of songwriting run all over the map, but there is a down-to-earth honesty and straightforward poetic nature that secedes throughout his varying styles. Hello, I’m Dan Melchior, his first home-recorded solo album (with vitally helping hands from his wife, Letha Rodman), finds Melchior breaking away from his established garage rock sound and exploring all kinds of insanely catchy lo-fi pure-pop ground, effortlessly recalling such timeless luminaries as the Kinks, Johnny Cash, the Stranglers, and countless others. But snappy tunes aren’t all that’s here: Melchior’s rambling, insightfully provocative rants are sung-spoken in his native British accent with a brazen honesty and poetic knack that makes them just as memorable as his melodies. Hello, I’m Dan Melchior will surely provide you with great mix-tape material for generations to come and is an easy choice as the best dirty pop-rock album since Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight.