So If States Can't Kick Presidential Candidates Off Ballots, Why Can They Kick Voters Off Voter Rolls?
PLUS: Two new albums from Philadelphia's punk scene
To no one’s surprise, the Supreme Court ruled last week that the Constitution does not allow states to keep insurrectionists from running for president. The case (Trump v. Anderson) arose from a 4-3 ruling handed down by the Colorado State Supreme Court that found Donald Trump had engaged in insurrection following the 2020 election and was therefore barred from appearing as a candidate for president on Colorado’s ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court based their ruling on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, “No person shall…hold any office, civil or military, under the United States…who, having previously taken an oath…as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
The decision was unanimous. Count me among those who think the Court got the holding right. The basic rationale here is that a state should not be able to disqualify a candidate for national office through their own enforcement of a national constitutional standard. That makes sense: If it was up to each individual state to decide what constituted “engag[ing] in insurrection,” it would be possible for individual states through a variety of means—legislation, court rulings, administrative fiat—to mess with the outcome of a national election. (Imagine if Georgia’s Republican Attorney General or Wisconsin’s Republican legislature determined Joe Biden was an insurrectionist and barred him this year from the ballot in their respective states, both of which Biden won in 2020.) A candidate who runs afoul of a constitutional standard for serving as president should be ineligible in every state; similarly, if a candidate meets that constitutional standard, they should be eligible in every state.
Yet while that decision was unanimous, it was not without some fireworks. The Court’s conservative boys club decided not just to declare Colorado’s decision unconstitutional, but to announce how a candidate would need to be declared ineligible as an insurrectionist. The Court’s three liberal ladies objected to that because a.) That wasn’t a question raised by this case; and b.) The method the conservatives prescribed—an official act of Congress—feels like it was made in bad faith.
Why? Well, the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t actually say it’s up to Congress to activate the insurrectionist clause. As I read the amendment, it does say Congress can pass laws to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, not that Congress must pass laws for the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to take effect. More importantly, though, the Court’s ruling shuts down other ways in which a candidate for president could be declared an insurrectionist at the federal level, most notably through the courts. In other words, neither you nor I would get far by filing a lawsuit in federal court arguing Trump is ineligible to serve as president because he is an insurrectionist, as the Supreme Court has said that’s not for the judicial system to decide. It sounds like even if Jack Smith secured a conviction against Trump for election fraud that that wouldn’t be enough to disqualify Trump, either.
It would instead be up to Congress to declare Trump an insurrectionist, but even if Congress did that (say, after Democrats won control of both houses in the 2024 election) the Supreme Court reserves the right to decide if Congress correctly applied the insurrectionist clause. Not all that objectionable on account of the whole principle of judicial review, but just look at what the conservative justices did there: They cut off the legal avenues to challenge Trump’s eligibility, declared it a political question only Congress can resolve, and then made themselves rather than Congress the final arbiter of the question (presumably to keep a Democratic Congress from ousting Trump.) In other words, it’s a political question…until it’s not.
So it is understandable why the Supreme Court’s liberal ladies would be upset with the conservative boys club: The men answered a question that wasn’t asked in a way that forecloses one potentially promising way to challenge an oathbreaking insurrectionist’s eligibility for president. And the first half of that conclusion was actually a bipartisan judgment, as the Court’s other female justice, conservative Amy Coney Barrett, agreed the Court didn’t need to go any further than to simply say this was not a matter for the individual states to decide.
But then Justice Karen took a swipe at the Court’s liberals, writing
The majority’s choice of a different path leaves the remaining Justices with a choice of how to respond. In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.
“A choice of how to respond?” I’m sorry, but Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson are not first graders who pushed a classmate to the ground after that classmate stole the ball they were playing with at recess. Also, the reason this issue is “politically charged” in this “volatile season” is because the American political system keeps tiptoeing around a guy who sent a mob to the Capitol to undermine an election he lost. As for that “unanimity” she and the other conservative justices cherish, how unanimous is a unanimous decision that has to distinguish between “we” (the men) and “they” (the ladies)? And finally, someone needs to tell Barrett not to tell the three dissenting female justices in the Dobbs opinion to just keep their mouths shut and live with it.
But I digress.
I actually kind of fall in the middle here. I agree with the holding: There should be a national standard for presidential eligibility. That’s a theory of federalism I can get behind. But while liberals have criticized the conservatives on the Court for answering a question they weren’t asked, (and with an answer that is too limited to boot,) because this question has never been asked before and for the sake of avoiding/preparing for a looming constitutional crisis, it does at least seem wise to hint at how a question concerning presidential eligibility would be determined. The Court should have said only a federal action—congressional legislation, a federal lawsuit—can ultimately disqualify someone from the presidency and left it at that.
But about that “national standard for presidential eligibility.” There’s a major implication that comes out of that that no one is talking about: If the Supreme Court just articulated a uniform national standard for presidential eligibility, then surely there must be a uniform national standard for voting for president. (I would argue that same logic applies to the federal offices of senator and representative as well.) If states can’t kick presidential candidates running in a nationwide election off their ballots, why can states kick people who want to vote in a nationwide presidential election off their voter rolls?
Here’s the key part of Trump v. Anderson regarding this issue:
[S]tate enforcement of Section 3 with respect to the Presidency would raise heightened concerns. “[I]n the context of a Presidential election, state-imposed restrictions implicate a uniquely important national interest” (Anderson v. Celebrezze). But state-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that “the President . . . represent[s] all the voters in the Nation” (Id. [emphasis added])….
The “patchwork” that would likely result from state enforcement would “sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States” as a whole (U. S. Term Limits). But in a Presidential election “the impact of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast”— or, in this case, the votes not allowed to be cast—“for the various candidates in other States.”
What the Court is basically saying here is that the way any one state conducts its election for president has the potential to affect the outcome of a national election everyone in the United States can vote in. Consequently, there must be some “uniform answer” to the question of presidential eligibility every state must follow. We can’t have states sabotaging an election for national office by arbitrarily throwing a serious national contender off the ballot. Such chicanery could keep the will of the American people as a whole from being heard. Again, imagine if the Republican legislatures of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona had kept Biden off their ballots in 2020. That would have been enough to tilt an election the American people clearly wanted Biden to win to Trump.
Yet there is no “uniform [national] answer” when it comes to questions of electoral procedures and voter eligibility. Yes, the Constitution does stipulate that any American citizen over the age of eighteen can vote in the United States, but election procedures and other issues related to eligibility differ from state to state. That means it’s very possible that the way any one state conducts its election for president has the potential to affect the outcome of an election the people of the United States as a whole are a party to. Heck, even the way one county conducts its elections has the potential to alter the outcome of a super-close presidential election, as demonstrated by Palm Beach County, Florida’s “butterfly ballot,” which in all likelihood cost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election.
Currently, elections for national office in the United States are governed by a “patchwork” of voting rules across the states: Automatic voter registration, online registration, same-day registration, registration deadlines, early/in-person absentee voting, no-excuse absentee voting, vote by mail, ballot drop boxes, ranked-choice voting, etc. States have different rules when it comes to the number of polling places open on Election Day (a shortage of which can lead to long wait times) and when polling places are open. Felon voting rights differ from state-to-state: In two states and the District of Columbia, felons are allowed to vote even while incarcerated, while in half the states, felons may have to wait for a period of time after completing their sentences, pay outstanding fines, receive a pardon, or complete some other action before reacquiring the right to vote.
And then there’s the issue of voter ID laws. I won’t argue voter ID laws are inherently bad, but many states have turned to them recently in an effort to disenfranchise voters. For example, for someone to vote, some states require voters to show government-issued forms of ID, the most common of which is a driver’s license, but many low-income and urban voters don’t own cars and therefore have no need for a driver’s license. Texas requires a photo ID to confirm a voter’s identity, but while voters are allowed to produce a gun permit to meet this requirement, they cannot use a college-issued student ID. Citizens who don’t have an ID are still allowed to vote in every state, but their votes aren’t counted until after they verify their identity, which can be a time-consuming process. Studies have found one in five voters don’t realize they need to bring an ID with them to vote, and that voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters. It’s worth noting the catalyst behind this new era of voter ID laws is the Supreme Court, which, by gutting the Civil Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), empowered many conservative-led states (particularly those in the South) to pass dozens of new voting restrictions.
Voter rights and accessibility to the polls matter because the Trump campaign hopes to weaponize voting laws to challenge the eligibility of voters in battleground states in the 2024 election, at times focusing on Democratic-leaning precincts. In some cases, “election investigators” have pushed election officials to purge voters en masse. Plans are underway to use state laws to challenge the eligibility of voters and to harass poll workers on Election Day. (In the 2021 Georgia senate run-off election, Trump-affiliated groups challenged the eligibility of over 360,000 voters, and similar groups hope to challenge more registrations in 2024.) Even when these groups fail, they often succeed at placing more roadblocks in the way of voters who want to vote. This is happening despite an overwhelming lack of evidence of anything close to the widespread voter fraud Trump claims cost him the 2020 election.
Joe Biden may have handily defeated Donald Trump in the popular vote in 2020, but his real margin of victory in the Electoral College came down to a few tens of thousands of votes—tenths of percentages—in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Messing at the margins of those states’ elections could have easily produced a different result in 2020. If the Supreme Court was actually concerned with keeping a few states from manipulating the outcome of a national presidential election held to determine the will of tens of millions of Americans, one would think it would not only want to intervene to ensure states adhere to “uniform” national standards concerning both electoral procedures and voter eligibility, but would want to adopt the broadest and most universal notion of voting rights possible. Instead, it lets states adopt different standards, some of which have the effect of restricting access to the polls.
Even more galling about the Supreme Court’s actions, however, is the deference the Court gives to Donald Trump in the name of an “important national interest.” The Court insists states must keep Trump on the ballot so that a rogue state doesn’t end up skewing the results of the 2024 election. OK, fair enough. Yet where is that same concern when states deny voters access to the ballot, which, given the way those efforts openly target Democratic constituencies, could just as easily skew this election’s results? One can’t help but see a partisan motivation here. It seems the conservative members of the Court will bend over backwards to accommodate the political ambition of Donald Trump but can hardly be bothered to take a stand for ordinary voters.
Signals and Noise
MUST-READ ARTICLE: “The Much Vaunted Guardrails are Failing” by Thomas Zimmer
By Richard Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick for Slate: “It’s Past Time to Quit Hoping the Courts Are Going to Stop Trump” (“[A]ll this wishcasting about a Supreme Court that is going to save us has material costs. It deludes us into thinking that someone else is going to rush in while we watch and cheer from the stands. Call it Mueller Derangement Syndrome or whatever else you’d like. But let’s stop thinking there’s someone else. The 2024 election, like everything else, all comes down to turnout. That isn’t in the court’s hands. It’s in ours.”)
Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein of Politico explore a possible unintended consequence of the Supreme Court’s ballot eligibility ruling: That if Democrats gain control of Congress in 2025 but Trump wins the presidency, Democrats could use their first days in Congress to pass a statute disqualifying Trump from the presidency as an insurrectionist.
By Aziz Huq of Politico: “Why is Trump Getting Special Treatment from the Supreme Court?” (“There is no good answer. It is hard to see any legally sound reason why the Supreme Court should have decided to step in to hear Trump’s implausible and constitutionally destructive claim for absolute criminal immunity — especially when it has refused to hear so many other criminal defendants’ far more meritorious claims.”)
Jonathan Karl of ABC News notes the Court’s unanimous decision in favor of Trump deflates his argument that the system is rigged against him.
Trump posted the $91.6 million bond needed to appeal the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case.
There is growing sentiment in the RNC to pay Trump’s legal bills, and it doesn’t look like opponents to that idea will be able to stop it.
It’s now official: Trump’s daughter-in-law is co-chair of the RNC.
With Super Tuesday over and Nikki Haley out of the race, it’s now officially a rematch between Joe Biden and Don Trump. Aaron Zitner and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal have the rundown on this 2020 rematch between elderly and widely disliked candidates (one of whom is facing dozens of criminal charges.)
Trump’s victory speech Tuesday night was apocalyptic. (“Frankly, our country is dying,” he said.) But then again, 65% of the country thinks the country is moving in the wrong direction according to a new New York Times poll.
Trump will soon begin receiving intelligence briefings as the Republican nominee for president. John Sakellariadis and Erin Banco of Politico write, “The decision would be in keeping with a tradition that dates back to 1952, but it would mark the first time an administration has volunteered to share classified information with a candidate who is facing criminal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents.”
Trump and Biden took different approaches in wooing Haley voters after she dropped out. Trump insulted Haley after she dropped out of the race, then encouraged her supporters to back him. Biden, on the other hand, recognized her courage in challenging Trump and told her supporters there was a place for them in his campaign. Haley remained non-committal during her speech announcing the suspension of her campaign.
Nate Cohn of the New York Times found nearly half of Haley voters voted for Biden in 2020, suggesting Haley voters may not represent a big source of new voters for Biden in 2024.
Biden’s immediate strategy? According to Elena Schneider of Politico, it’s to bury the cash-strapped Trump campaign in contrast ad-spending to define Trump the way the Obama campaign defined Mitt Romney early in 2012.
Reviewing the polls, Greg Sargent of The New Republic finds large swaths of voters are unaware of Trump’s authoritarian remarks (i.e., that he wants to be “dictator for a day.”) As Sargent writes, “That’s maddening for obvious reasons. But it also presents the Biden campaign with an opportunity. If voters are unaware of all these statements, there’s plenty of time to make voters aware of them—and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to respondents, shift them against Trump.”
Ruth Igielnik and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times note the number of Americans who think Trump committed crimes is also in decline.
By Jennifer Medina and Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times: “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Trump?”
By most accounts, Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address was a success. CNN has a recap.
One key moment: When Biden said the Senate border bill Republicans refuse to pass but he is willing to sign contains the “toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen” and the camera cut away to the bill’s author, Republican Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, who mouthed the words, “That’s true.”
Tyler Pager of the Washington Post looks at how Biden often consults with politicians and other elected officials rather than aides before making final decisions as president.
Republican Senator Katie Britt’s response to Biden’s SOTU address was widely panned. Even Republicans didn’t have much nice to say about it. But the biggest story now about it is that she misled viewers into thinking a decades-old story about sexual assault in Mexico was a consequence of Biden’s border policy.
Congress passed a long overdue spending bill to avert a partial shutdown of the federal government. It still needs to pass another bill by March 22 to keep the rest of the government funded, but that bill will be a heavier lift.
A week after Mitch McConnell announced he was stepping down as the Senate’s Republican leader (The Week has some funny McConnell cartoons on that subject) McConnell endorsed Don Trump for president.
Republican Indiana Senator Todd Young announced he will not endorse Don Trump for president.
Republican Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan told MSNBC the event that prompted him to get into the senate race was Republicans voting down the border bill. My translation: “Unfortunately, there’s so much obstruction right now in DC that I decided to run for office to empower the obstructionists and become the highly respected, Romney-esque voice of reason in the Republican caucus.” See also:
Hogan also declined to say whether he would vote to protect in vitro fertilization or codify Roe v. Wade. He did say he would vote for neither Trump nor Biden. (Does this guy stand for anything?)
Independent (formerly Democratic) Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced she would not run for re-election. Despite having initially styled herself as a progressive, Sinema has spent the past four years putting the brakes on Democratic initiatives like paid leave, universal child care/pre-K, corporate tax cuts, a minimum wage hike, and a more extensive prescription drug price control plan. She also stood in the way of eliminating the filibuster. Her legacy will be how difficult she made it to get to yes. Her presence will not be missed.
Paul Kane of the Washington Post notes that as more veteran Republican members of Congress from solidly red districts retire, they are increasingly replaced this primary season by more rabidly conservative politicians.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, Lt. Governor Mark Robinson:
You can get to know this guy and what he thinks about women (“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,”) abortion, climate change, Jewish people, the Holocaust, Barack and Michelle Obama, victims of gun violence (it leaves out what he thinks about the Las Vegas country music festival mass shooting), LGBTQ, Islam, the Civil Rights Movement, the Confederate flag, and Black people by reading this article by Molly Olmstead of Slate or this one by Jeremy Childs of Rolling Stone or this one by Hunter Walker of TPM from a year ago. What does Donald Trump think about him? Just last week, Trump said this: “This is Martin Luther King on steroids….I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”
The former chair of the Florida GOP won’t face legal charges for taping a sexual encounter due to lack of evidence.
MUST-READ ARTICLE: By Josh Barro: “Sonia Sotomayor Must Retire”
The Supreme Court put a hold on a Texas law allowing local law enforcement and judges to arrest and deport migrants who cross into the United States illegally.
Voters in San Francisco tacked to the center in last Tuesday’s election, leading to this headline in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Voters Make It Clear: San Francisco Can No Longer Be Called a Progressive City” (But let’s also make this clear: It’s still a very, very Democratic city.)
Alabama passed a law granting immunity to IVF providers and patients. They left the personhood question unanswered, though.
The country’s first over-the-counter birth control pill will become available this month.
Jim Tankersley of the New York Times reports Trump’s tax cuts boosted investment in the US economy and delivered a modest pay bump to US workers, but did not come close to paying for themselves, as the overall economic benefit was modest and increased the debt by $100 billion per year.
Jonathan Lis of Haaretz writes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to undermine war cabinet minister Benny Gantz’s visit to the United States last week. Polls have the more moderate Gantz crushing Netanyahu in elections.
John Hudson of the Washington Post reports on the 100+ weapons sales and deliveries that have occurred between the United States and Israel since the start of the war in Gaza.
A Wall Street Journal poll found 60% of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza and a growing number believe the US is not doing enough to help the Palestinians.
During his State of the Union Address, Biden ordered the US military to construct a port in Gaza to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
A Russian missile strike landed within 500 feet of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a visit to Odessa with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Nataliya Gumenyuk reports for The Atlantic on the perilous situation at Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russian media released a call between German Luftwaffe officers discussing the presence of UK soldiers on the ground in Ukraine who are assisting the Ukrainian army with the operation of British Storm Shadow missiles.
NPR can get you up-to-date on the situation in Haiti, where gangs are operating in the open and directly challenging the authority of the central government, which is nowhere to be seen.
Top 5 Records Music Review: Two New Albums from Philadelphia’s Punk Scene
Philadelphia’s rock and roll bona fides are well established. American Bandstand got its start there in the 1950s, and many of the show’s earliest performers, including Fabian and Chubby Checker, were signed to local record labels. The smooth soul sound orchestrated by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff for the stable of artists affiliated with Philadelphia International Records (the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes) defined soul music in the 1970s. Patti LaBelle, Daryl Hall and John Oates, and the Roots hail from the city. Philadelphia is also in Bruce Springsteen’s backyard, making it a major hub of E Street Nation.
More recently, Philadelphia has hosted what some consider to be the nation’s best punk scene. That’s perhaps unsurprising, given the city’s rough and raucous spirit and its position between two of American punk’s most important locales, New York City and Washington DC. While most of Philly’s punk rock bands have never reached a level of fame beyond the local basement party circuit, a few have received some national and international exposure. Two of those bands—Mannequin Pussy and Sheer Mag—released new albums on the same day last weekend.
I Got Heaven, Mannequin Pussy’s fourth album and the band’s first since 2019’s Patience (featuring the acclaimed “Drunk II”) draws on the power and drone of 90s alternative rock bands like Sleater-Kinney, Foo Fighters, and, both sonically and spiritually, Hole. Listen closely enough and you can hear the fuzzed-out squall of My Bloody Valentine holding the record together. If that’s not enough to establish its punk credentials, then the three hardcore songs on the record’s second half should do the trick. It’s the sort of album fans of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts move on to once they get an unfiltered look at the power dynamics underlying male-female relationships.
I Got Heaven is a primal, carnal album, a punk record in heat. Like Iggy Pop or Patti Smith, lead singer Missy Dabice is unafraid to channel punk’s animalistic sexual impulses. The album thrums with raw desire and Dabice’s determination to get or take whatever she wants. She has insatiable needs, and she’s willing to destroy or use others to fulfill them. Her thoughts can be unsettling but they’re also psychologically unfiltered, a missive straight from her punk-rock lizard brain.
But the album is hardly that simpleminded. Dig deeper and you’ll find an exploration of the toxic relationship between God and Man. On the opening title track, Dabice finds the divine within herself, singing she is “an angel/ …sent here/ To keep you company” and that she has “heaven/ Inside of me.” That spark of the divine makes her desirable, and she knows it. But she has desires, too, and, as a divine being, has the power to fulfill them. (“I went and walked myself/ Like a dog without a leash” she shouts at the top of the album.) Her Hellenistic conception of the almighty—libertine, pleasure-seeking, self-centered, mean, controlling, at times out of control, and unconcerned with the consequences of her actions—is empowering but hardly flattering.
Dabice’s angel covets her power and freedom; as she screams on “Loud Bark”, “Not a single motherfucker who has tried to lock me up/ Could get the collar round my neck.” But power and freedom is a two-way street. Midway through the album, on the hardcore “OK? OK! OK? OK!”, bassist Colins Regisford (the only male member of the band) rants to Dabice about the abysmal direction his life has taken. He demands that both she and God “bend the knee” and give him what he wants. If the almighty isn’t treating him right, why not slip a collar round its neck and bottle some of that power up for himself?
With worshipers like that, who would want to be a god? But then again, what is a god without worshipers? Dabice howls on “Aching”, the last of the record’s three hardcore tracks
I just wanted to feel human
I was starving for some touch
I got to, I got to, I got to, I got to be free…Rewind yourself, get me off
Make me feel so elite (Free, free, free, free)
Are we merely playthings in the world of gods, something to keep them company, a means for the divine to realize their own power, freedom, and superiority? Yet what is a god that would submit to mere mortals, to men who would denigrate and appropriate the divine for their own ends? This tension comes to the fore on “Split Me Open”, the album’s final track, as Dabice sings, “My body’s a temple/ It was built for you…/ I’m worried I want you”. The feminine divine is powerful, yet imperiled by its association with Mankind.
Playing Favorites by Sheer Mag is a more carefree rock and roll album, one more interested in granting listeners escape than in affording them an opportunity to rage against a sick and twisted world. Whereas I’ve Got Heaven was grounded in the sounds of 90s alternative rock and hardcore, Playing Favorites draws from every corner of 70s classic rock. That’s a departure from their previous album, A Distant Call (2019), a more political record that reveled in sounds of late 70s/early 80s heavy metal. Sheer Mag sounds nimbler here, its guitar heroics anchoring and then slipping in and out of the album’s upbeat melody-driven songs.
Sheer Mag’s main touchstone is power-pop, that sort of alternate universe version of punk rock that could have upended the bloated rock and roll of the 1970s if the decade hadn’t demanded grimier, more abrasive music. The band invites listeners to singalong and rock out to their music, which would sound at home on a Guardians of the Galaxy mixtape. On a song like “Eat It and Beat It”, Sheer Mag is reminiscent of a less-obnoxious New York Dolls.
Still, the band doesn’t polish their music up too much. Kyle Seely keeps his guitar solos fuzzed-out and ramshackle enough to suggest the band has kind of thrown the record together, and lead singer Tina Halladay, who stretches her voice into Perry Farrell’s at times, often sounds as though she’s singing into a crappy microphone. Even though this isn’t a live record, you get the sense this is pretty close to what they would sound like on stage.
Yet Playing Favorites remains an homage to classic rock. Seely’s guitar solos serve as the album’s rocket fuel. Some prog-rock flourishes sneak through along the way, but the most surprising element of this record are the twangy nods to southern rock, such as those that open the album’s centerpiece “Moonstruck” (see Exit Music). Numerous songs imply the band has spent much of the past five years listening to “Ramblin’ Man” by the Allman Brothers Band on repeat. We don’t live in a world of pop music dominated by guitar bands anymore, but Playing Favorites is a reminder of how much fun that music can be.
While Mannequin Pussy may be more of a critical darling, Sheer Mag is the band more likely to be added to personal playlists. Either way, the latest albums by both of these Philadelphia bands are worth checking out.