The name of an EP can oftentimes accurately describe the sound of the record. I think this holds true with Ragpicker's Familiar Sounds EP. The record begins with what the band's name better describes–a tense guitar picking that sounds oddly dampened by a rag (tUne-YarDs style). Four measures later is when the "familiar sounds" begin to kick in for any fan of heavy rock music. Droning guitars, slower mid-tempo stoner beats broken up with double-time rhythms and strategically placed drum fills make up the majority of the first two tracks. Palm mutes and calculated pauses are sprinkled in towards the end of "Soliloquy," backed with vocals that sound like someone is frantically yelling up at you as you stand on the ledge of a 10-story building.

I think I saw Ragpicker play once at a coffee shop in Hernando, Mississippi sometime last year. I can't be sure. I know Ryan O'Neal was playing drums, and his older brother Rob was there watching him. I was playing drums with Captain & Company that night and we performed right before them. The band that I saw had four members and a sound that would lean more towards the musical tastes of a rebellious southern teenager in suburban Mississippi (think Christian metalcore-turned-Kylesa with a steady diet of Thrice) rather than the more mature sound of their current release (just Kylesa, no bullshit). Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing these guys for being young and playing music that I would expect to hear from an older group of middle-aged single guys. It merely seems as if they are stretching for something beyond their personal experience, like a younger kid sibling jealous of his older brother's record collection, porn stash and ability to buy cigarettes.

The record continues and starts to get a little more interesting as the songs unfold. Kip Johnston or Nick Cox's vocals begin to cut through the mask of dense guitars and I start to hear more self-expression rather than posturing. "And they will build a house around you / not to protect you / but to keep you in" reveals some sort of existential angst during the whammy-effected bridge in "Underside." "Headshrinkers" begins with a lot of promise, immediately delivering a complex 4/4 rhythm that leaves the listener in suspense but trails off into the safety of open B-tuned guitars after the 45-second mark. Their performance sounds very well-rehearsed.

The record ends with "Remain," a 3-minute jam that is interrupted by a build that leads up to the most expressive moments on the record. I'm sure the trio expects the song to come across as grueling, dramatic and urgent (given the low pitched vocal delivery mixed with a shrill cry of despair), but it really just sounds jubilant, joyous and endearing, almost like early Mineral covering a Frodus song. The song doesn't leave me feeling empty as the song title would suggest. Instead, it leaves me with the reminder of how great it feels to create something. The record rewards the patient listener but also leaves you skeptical of how aware or literate they present themselves to be (they pull their name from a novel by Cormac McCarty). All in all, the members of Ragpicker are doing what every human being does. They are soaking up the world around them and making sense of it in the best way that they see fit, and the way they see fit is through drop-tuned guitars and a lot of heavy hitting.