The Paybacks

Love, Not Reason (Savage Jams)

By Anna Breshears
Published: January 25th, 2007 | 12:13pm

Detroit is a bad ass. If you were Portland, Seattle or, god forbid, Chapel Hill, you’d turn and run if you saw Detroit coming down the street. Its industrial brick facades, cruel grey skies, and gritty sprawl of a structure fuels the hard-edged escapism that chugging guitars provide. Like their hometown, the Paybacks fight dirty.

On Love, Not Reason, released on their own Savage Jams label, the band keeps it loud, short, and sweet with massive power chords, wailing riffs, and singer Wendy Case’s deep growl of a voice. Case is in her early forties, and clearly could care less about her perceived “cool” factor. Like Joan Jett and Jeanette Napolitano, she sings like it’s her life’s mission. The band sticks to rocknroll basics and kicks out jams that reference AC/DC and the Dictators. Right off the bat, the Paybacks prove they’re worthy of any arena in the US with the driving, ballsy “Love Letter” and “Call When You’re Ready”.

While most of the songs here follow the brief, catchy, balls-out formula set up by the first two, the six-minute “Painkiller” interjects quieter, bluesy verses with Case’s impassioned screams of “I’m going to kill the pain inside” and an ass-kicking chorus. Love, Not Reason continues in the love-‘em-even-though-they-hurt-you vein with the triumphant head-banging of “Divided by Two” and the propulsive “Like a Man.”

The Paybacks aren’t breaking the rocknroll mold, but who cares? They know how to write, they know how to play, and most importantly, they know how to rock without a trace of irony.