Review of The Gab Cinque Band's "The Wheel"

The Long-Awaited Full-Length Debut of One of Today's Most Exceptional Artists

Cover painting by Gab Cinque with digital assistance from Karlee Bloom

“Not much of interest is happening nationally and internationally yet in this return of the 1950s, but Monmouth County, New Jersey is the locus of a thriving local scene which could lead to national and international greatness again if any local scene could. And one of the scene’s leading artists is The Gab Cinque Band. They represent the best of today’s trends—newfound autonomy—and go beyond it with performances in some not-so-small (and not-so-local) venues and more ambitious recording projects. Their independent extended play debut, Highway Junkie, was recorded at Shore Fire Studios in Long Branch and released earlier this year. EPs are technically considered singles, but Highway Junkie, while concise at nineteen minutes, impresses and rewards the listener with the cohesion of a more epic and integrated album.”

From my review of The Gab Cinque Band’s Highway Junkie

Music aficionados older than I remember a time when multiple debut releases captivated a listener (and live audience member) craving for quality new art in one’s own time and place and not willing to rely solely on veterans and those who are already gone. In the late 1980s, I captured a bit of the tail end of this phenomenon. After around 1991, a captivating debut release arrived roughly once a decade, in my estimation, in a culture complacent with American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and baby boomer/early Generation X nostalgia shows. Cinema had deteriorated even more, and literature is on life support, too.

Shortly before I returned to Los Angeles in 2009, I attended an event at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The event was The Stone Pony’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration (there were multiple events this year celebrating the venue’s fiftieth). Bon Jovi’s David Bryan had joined the Bobby Bandiera Band onstage. I was an outsider to New Jersey (and probably always will be), raised right across the river in Pennsylvania, but I remember thinking that, aside from family and friends, this music scene would be all I would miss about life in the tri-state area. At the time, I thought the music scene was primarily aging veterans with maybe another few decades left before it was time to retire. Maybe it was at the time. I wouldn’t know.

The world has and hasn’t changed since 2009. Bon Jovi has certainly seen better days, as recently as 2009 and the two years that followed. The veterans are fifteen years older. Some of them, like Clarence Clemons and Kevin Kavanaugh, are gone. I continued to follow music in New Jersey over the years, often visiting for the holidays and my late grandfather’s Independence Day birthday, attending performances by the veterans and Jesse Malin and his bands (who are practically honorary members of the scene themselves). I cherished the veterans (and still do), thinking that, due to the shape of the culture, nothing notable would succeed them.

Sometimes, being wrong is a godsend.

Returning to the tri-state area three years ago, I discovered there is a vibrant, inventive, artistic, engaging, and entertaining multigenerational scene of efficacious players and writers with melodic flair, vocal and instrumental skill, and élan. Many of the artists are young.

None is more captivating than The Gab Cinque Band.

On December 6, The Gab Cinque Band released The Wheel, their debut full-length LP. Those who have been enjoying their debut release, last year’s Highway Junkie, have been eagerly anticipating it since.

To state that it doesn’t disappoint is a considerable understatement.

The Gab Cinque Band is a five-person phenomenon entertaining and moving audiences all over the East Coast (and, hopefully soon, beyond). Gab Cinque is an adept, versatile vocalist with a few different voices (all equally effective); a pensive, penetrating lyricist; and a confident front woman with a command of the stage. Fran O’Brien is a multi-instrumentalist equally adept at guitar, keys, and other instruments (his arsenal includes bass pedals and voice box). Matt Stanley shreds Gibson guitars like a Sunset Strip resident in the Reagan Administration, except with better taste and phrasing. Aaron Manzo’s accomplished, interstitial bass lines provide subtle color, and his baritone vocals are highlights of the band’s live shows. Anthony Walton integrates with Manzo, providing the band an adroit, solid fulcrum behind his drum set. After decades of watching instrumental and vocal skill become obsolescent then obsolete (at least on a popular level), the band members’ abilities alone are more than welcome. Their cover versions of post-Eighties material usually far exceed the originals in quality, and their versions of more classic tunes, from Elton John to KISS, can stand up with those perennials.

Their exceptional song craft is as impressive as their performances.

The Wheel, like Highway Junkie, was produced by Cinque and O’Brien at Shorefire Recording Studios in Long Branch. The production is warm and organic, not overproduced, listless, and anemic like so much twenty-first century pop. O’Brien’s keys typically have the sound of organ and electric piano, not cold synthesizer, and the instruments, style, and production remind the listener of the best of a distant past in a way that avoids the death carrier of nostalgia. It serves the artist’s purpose in the moment and is a prelude to a hopefully lengthy artistic oeuvre. Even more than Highway Junkie (which it complements and with which it shares a tune), it has the scope of a self-contained whole, not a disparate collection of songs. With two releases, the band perhaps now has the start of what Frank Zappa called “conceptual continuity”—a career in which all songs and albums are interrelated.

The long player starts with “Let It Out”. One of the guitarists (probably O’Brien) plays an infectious riff with slight variations, as if he is experimenting with the perfect rhythm before the rest of the band kicks in and the rhythm becomes uniform. The subterranean acoustic guitar is a perfect production touch reminiscent of Eddie Kramer’s work with KISS. The power and versality of Cinque’s voice is apparent in this track, with mellower vocal passages contrasting with the more puissant singing. The lead guitar deftly mirrors the rhythm, starting close to the main riff before diverging effectively.

“Highway Funky” is sort of a sequel to the EP’s title track (Zappa’s conceptual continuity again). It’s slower and demonstrates how the songwriting team constructs complicated hard rock songs. It’s not quite progressive rock, but, compared to the mind-numbing repetition and monotony of Nineties simpleton songs, it might as well be. The rhythm section plays inventively here.

“Fuchsia” is an undisputed highlight. Beavis and Butt-head would love this one, which is high praise—they might not be the brightest bulbs in the lighting gallery but they are nonpareil music critics (usually). Starting with a classic O’Brien descending riff the two boneheads would instantly add to their trademark air guitar and vocalizing repertoire, the song quickly settles into a dance groove. The singer welcomes the audience “to this boogie wonderland”. It’s easy to picture the boys switching to their infamous booty-shaking dance around the television set if “Fuchsia”, “the grooviest of colors”, was playing. The tinkling ivories are a reminder of this band’s multiplicity of sounds and styles, and the handclaps highlight this track’s production. After a few minutes of grooving, the metal intro is reprised. “Fuchsia” stands out as one of the band’s most arresting achievements to date. It would be an astounding live set opener.

“Twisted Position” is next. I’m not sure how literal to take Cinque’s compelling lyrics, but she is particularly emotive vocally on this one. Manzo plays well here. The track doesn’t immediately capture this listener’s interest like the others, but there isn’t a dud on the entire album.

The title track does capture the feel of a spinning wheel with angular chords and a meandering riff. Listen closely to the details, including the unpredictable ending. Sometimes, the music does speak for itself.

“Blind” is another first-rate track. It’s a little reminiscent of the punkier moments of early Genesis (“Fly on a Windshield” is a point of reference, probably coincidentally). Fortunately, it has none of Peter Gabriel’s early modernist inclinations. Cinque’s lyrics can be abstract but they are not discursive and unintelligible. (“A work of art that just wasn’t signed/Are you afraid to let darkness shine?” is certainly a striking couplet.) The multitracked keyboards, from the low rhythmic dirge to the higher swirling soloing, are what define this one.

“Scorpion” is uncharacteristically menacing, as evocative of a scorpion as “The Wheel” is of a wheel. (These five know how to bring imagery to musical life.) The abrupt, frenetic, quasi-thrash coda drives this one home with a bite (or is that a sting?) that comes out of nowhere from such a warm, benevolent band and vocalist, onstage and offstage. (I don’t know them well, but I think those who do would understand and might even agree.) That coda, uncharacteristic as it is, is one of The Wheel’s signature moments, ironically.

“Greens & Blues (Jam)” was primarily (or at least initially) composed by Walton, and it’s another track where the rhythm section noticeably carries the track. Cinque sings differently here, but it’s perfect for the song. It’s almost ineffable how a band with so many different styles can always still manage to sound unmistakably like them. Cinque, a painter of considerable skill (see the cover art), manages to use color to welcome effect in her lyrical palette.

“Structures” is a highlight of Highway Junkie as well as the band’s live shows and the only song common to both Highway Junkie and The Wheel. I think this was re-recorded during the LP sessions. Notice the contrapuntal keys.

The lyrical content of “The Music Man” ensures it’s hard for me to be anything close to objective. I love the voice box. This mystery man apparently has a penchant for whiskey and a certain amount of wealth. The vocals have an emotive grit that works, and the solo is one of the album’s best. “The Music Man” is another highlight of their live appearances.

“Wounds” is Stanley’s compositional contribution. It starts with a lilting, lyrical arpeggio before a driving, endearing riff that would have been at home among the best of metal and grunge. The soloing (by Stanley, I think) is masterful. This one’s a guitar tour de force.

The album closes with “Take Your Shot”, a fun romp, similar if a little less ambitious than the opening track. Cinque sings with subtle soul without being histrionic. The rhythm guitars crunch. The lead guitars scorch. The bass and drums each occasionally lead (you can hear more of Manzo on this one). The band’s songs can sound simple, but that’s often a skillful deception. The songs have a number of parts that reinforce each other, and this one is no exception. “Take Your Shot” is not the epic culmination of an album closer I know this band has in them, but it’s enjoyable and satisfying, and sometimes that’s just as important.

The Wheel is required listening for anyone with the slightest interest in the best rock of the last several decades. Its myriad influences are not obvious but channeled into the artist’s sui generis sound. The funk overtones grow on the listener, and the keyboards and production touches provide color, shade, and ambience absent from many lesser hard rock bands. The band manages to pack a number of musical ideas into relatively short songs, which is an oasis in a cultural desert of benighted simplicity. If I had any constructive criticism to offer, perhaps I would recommend more vocals from Manzo (they are welcome in concert), even a vocal duet, and a more definitive closer, but these are cavils. With The Wheel, The Gab Cinque Band have shown that the idea of the LP is not obsolete or even obsolescent. In this era of individual single downloads, this inestimable release is more relevant than ever. It reminds that the LP is still a living longform vehicle to integrate ostensibly disparate songs into a working whole that retains its indispensable individual units. Like a multifaceted Neil Peart lyric, it can be appreciated on many levels. Some will just crank the tunes and enjoy them, but those who listen repeatedly with attentive appreciation will hear the resurrection of a once-dying art.

The Wheel is available on all streaming platforms, and there are reports that good old-fashioned compact discs will be available at the band’s live appearances soon. Their indefatigable performance schedule is available at their website. Their ever-growing cover repertoire includes first-rate performances of everything from “Me and Bobby McGee” to “Bennie and the Jets” to Deep Purple’s “Highway Star”, Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mr. Crowley”, and KISS’s “Detroit Rock City”. With so many of the above retired now, it’s certainly a value to hear those classics done well. But The Gab Cinque Band are at their best playing their exceptional originals.