This Town's Disaster on CD

Blackpool Lights frontman Jim Suptic tends toward understatement. Upon the release of the Kansas City band's debut album, This Town's Disaster (on Suptic's own Curb Appeal Records), he says: 'This is just sincere, unpretentious rock music. We don't have a gimmick; what you see is what you get.' But the level of craft and passion underlining these 11 songs suggests there's more to Blackpool Lights than Suptic let's on. He's candid, for instance, about the band's birth, after the death of his previous outfit, the Get Up Kids. Much of the material on This Town's Disaster was written when the songwriter himself was in a transitional period. The new band, now comprised of Suptic (vocals, guitar), guitarist-singer Thom Hoskins, bassist Brian Everard and drummer Billy Brimblecom, started as a bunch of people who wanted to do something fresh and exciting. Blackpool Lights played exactly one gig before real disaster struck. Billy Brimblecom was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma. Suptic remembers: 'Billy knew he'd have to do his drum parts before he started getting sick from the chemo. It was unbelievable - Billy's hair was already falling out, but he tracked 14 songs in two days, and he did an amazing job.' Unable to arrest the spread of the cancer in his lower leg, his doctors would have to amputate at the knee. Everyone was stunned. But, Suptic says, 'Billy quickly realized, as he puts it, that it was either a funeral for him or a funeral for his leg, so he had the surgery.' Now cancer-free, Brimblecom has been fitted with a state-of-the-art, computer chip-enhanced prosthetic. 'When you see him onstage, you'd never know,' Suptic attests. Undeniable, too, is the magnetic appeal of This Town's Disaster tracks - almost all of them are persistently upbeat, sonically crisp, and instrumentally tight but they also manage to breathe. 'After what we've been through to make sure these songs get heard,' he says, 'everything seems to be alright. I guess you just have to hang in there and think positively and, it's amazing, but stuff does work out.'