It's gonna be a long wait so…

Waves of guitars pour out of my shitty 8-track. "The life you told me / ain't life at all…the truth you told me / ain't truth at all" - sings Rich McCulley (you bitch and moan 'who is he?' and we creep a car or two closer to the pumps) as the first song zips outta the speakers in as pure a guitar-centered power pop blazeaglory as anything being pressed these, or any, days. Wink at the girls going by on their roller-skates. Check the rearview to make sure my hair is parted straight. Comb it back in a feather, and then hit the volume knob up to bout three quarter so as to not distort the fuck out of this killer fucking album. One chick smiles back (I think she's skating over her!)…Fuck, this gas line shit ain't so bad now after all, is it?

It only seems like 1978. But, hell, if that was the near epicenter of an unqualified American rock and roll pop smarts explosion, Rich McCulley musta been just outside of ground zero (crouched under his elementary school desk no doubt) when the whole thing came raining down.

After the Moment Has Past is a staggeringly perfect little gem of a record. I mean that in every goddamn way too. It's concise (sumptin' like 28 minutes long), it's slathered in kick-ass hooks and grooves, it has a spot-on-I-can-hardly-believe-he's-doing-that-Stones-tune cover of Richards/Jagger's "Connection" (Between the Buttons for you completists), and it wags its tail for every one from Big Star to the Plimsouls to Tom Petty. Hell, McCulley even pulls off coming across like a menacing Marshall Crenshaw on "The Last Laugh". Very, very cool stuff.

But Rich McCulley defines this record with his guitar and his songwriting. He strings everything together on this disc with a fluid guitar that is far more efficient than showy. The playing shines a bright spot on the tunes. He's got this shit down pat. Enough so that I'd rather have someone strap headsets to my skull and have this record pumped through my ears a million times over (and believe me, anything blown through your ears that much winds up being pure hell…'cept of course maybe Elvis Costello at his finest) rather than giving the once-over to another overtly Beatle-esque "look at us - we're POWER poppers" band. And that's cuz McCulley is a rocknroller - he don't pay no mind to genre filling tripe. Genre's only exist for the narrow-minded anyhows, and McCulley just wants to make good-timey noise. I wanna hear it…you need to. Whether he's stomping out the Stones, or following it up perfectly with his own response to that tune - a little ditty called "Reaction" - McCulley knows that rock and roll should bash and pop. It should sound fucking solid (which After the Moment does in spades), it should have some kind of personality ("All I Can Do" elucidates McCulley), and it should be (gulp…here's where we go astray with the rock game too often these days) FUN. McCulley laughs at the whole goddamn process of rockroll on his closing tune "Change The Key" - as solid a statement of whatsitallabout as anyone is ballsy enough to press to plastic in the year two thousand. "Here I am / I'm coming to / bar eleven of a lonely twelve bar blues / you see I'm running out of things to say / guess I'll sing / just sing about a train (in vain) / I can't seem to get in tune" he says in "Change". Damnit, damnit, damnit, that's what I've been talking 'bout for three years here. And this sunvabitch nails it in one line.