5 out of 5

Label: Invisible

Produced by: Trey Spruance

Dare I hold Tub Ring up to the prism of their own musical history, judging their first wider-ly available record (their third album overall) by the comparative polish of their later releases?  Sure, there’s the heavy production sensibilities of Mr. Bungle guy Trey Spruance maybe guiding things, and Kevin Gibson’s science-tinged lyrics often swerve toward repetition before they really hit home, but… this is the album that put Tub Ring back on the map for me.  And although the group would start to shed the punkier elements that are the backbone of Drake, thus drawing something of a line between this release and the following one, the rampant vibe is familiar, and the disc certainly shares the honor of the rest of their catalogue of being eminently listenable, and eminently repeatable.  So perhaps it’s nostalgia tainting my perspective, but whenever I get in the mood for TR, the surf guitar riff of ‘Faster’ or the swoon-to-insanity of ‘Numbers,’ or the head-bobbing awesomeness of ‘She’s the Pro’ inevitably show up on my mental playlist.  In other words, the group did mature after this point, but Drake Equation is still very much Tub Ring, a tad emboldened by youth but already playing with Gibson and Kleiner’s tech-meets-humanity obsessions and sporting the group’s nigh-unmatched ability to genre-mash at the drop of a dime.