I’m just gonna come out and say this: RTB2 could kick The White Stripes’ ass. If The White Stripes were still together. But since they are not, this little gem of a duo from Denton, Texas are at the top of the game. They are the new dons of the bluesy post-punk mafia. It’s a small mafia, admittedly.
The band’s moniker denotes the “two” guys playing the songs of Ryan Thomas Becker (with Grady Don Sandlin on the drums), one of Denton’s foremost songwriters and musicians. He can be found all over the Dallas metroplex, performing his odd, jerky dances with any one of his four or five current musical projects. Most of those projects aren’t “his” per se, except for RTB2 and a strange stepbrother-band called RTB + Last Joke, but what’s his and not his doesn’t matter.
What matters are the riffs. Ryan Becker plays the guitar like a Harvard Rowing team jock shoves an oar – expertly, efficiently, with enough youthful finesse to elicit cheers from the crowd and suggestive looks from intelligent females. RTB2 play music like classic rock had a punk baby in the garage, then the little imp grew up and had a love child with a brooding, soulful, bluesy chick. This band is that love child.
There are two sides to this beast of a band - the studio sound and the live sound.
In the studio, the two keep their hair brushed and their teeth clean, and the sound is cohesive and tight-knit. This is evident on their free album from 2007, “The Both of It”, from which they still play songs (because the songs are just that damn good). You might want to order a copy of the 8-track only release from this year, “We Are A Strange Man”, released on Fort Worth’s Dead Media label. They are, if I had to guess, a bountiful source of pride and joy for the local Gutterth label which they call home.
If you have the pleasure of witnessing these two men live, you will discover that they truly unleash themselves, or rather that Ryan is one hell of a performer. He can capture an audience of beer-buzzed, chatty, cigarette-smoking hipsters like I’ve never seen anyone else do. If you don’t have the pleasure, which you probably won’t unless you find yourself located between Dallas and Austin sometime, you can stream a live performance from 2009′s North By 35 “conferette” on their Bandcamp.
It will, however, never compare to the emotionally-soothing-yet-physically-painful experience of standing before Ryan Thomas Becker’s Fender 2×12 amplifier in the flesh.
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