Roman Gods

The Fleshtones build this track like an ancient structure — massive, symmetrical, built to outlast whoever put it up. A two-chord organ figure establishes itself in the opening bars with the confidence of a foundation, and everything else is erected on top: a guitar that stabs rather than strums, a rhythm section so locked in it sounds mechanical even though every human seam shows. Peter Zaremba's voice carries the amphetamine charisma of a man announcing something urgent at a party no one else was invited to, a mid-range yelp that moves between conviction and hysteria without pausing at either. There is a pageantry to the whole construction, a sense that the song is performing its own mythology even as it plays, invoking something pre-Christian and civic at the same time — the title is not metaphorical decoration but a genuine frame through which the band views its own ambitions. The production, arriving in 1982, sounds deliberately antagonistic toward the era, allergic to synthesizers and digital gloss, committed instead to the sound of four people in a room with amplifiers turned past reason. The emotional register is triumphant but edged with the particular urgency of those who know triumph is temporary. This is New York underground music, the CBGBs lineage filtered through a love of Stax and the Kinks, and it belongs on a late-night drive through an empty city or the opening minutes of a party that has not yet decided how wild it wants to get.