Blog fave fxrrvst (got it in one!) is playing a show in Toronto with these guys next week. I’m going to the show, because I love fxrrvst (dammit, that one took three tries), so I figured I’d read up on the other act too. Turns out they’re great.

Dollar Signs is a band from Charlotte NC – earnest and funny lyrics, with obscure historical and pop-culture references, small-town problems and nostalgia for different small-town problems. All this over ska(ish) punk(ish) rock(ish) high-energy guitar music. Their current record is called Legend Tripping, and it’s a bit early Catch-22, a bit Hold Steady, a bit Borders and Boundaries, but fully their own unique sound. You won’t mistake them for another band:

This quote from a Brooklyn Vegan piece sums up the vibe of the band pretty well. Talking about the song above:

The Devil’s Tramping Ground is a clearing in the woods in Chatham County that supposedly nothing will grow in, animals will avoid and anything placed in the circle will be moved out of it by dawn. As the story goes it’s where the devil walks in a circle all night coming up with new ways to torment humanity like NFT’s, lactose intolerance and money. If you go there it is definitely a dirt patch in the woods but it’s mostly just filled with Miller Lite cans and condom boxes. Less the ephemera of the lord of darkness and more the unholy workings of bored teens.

The songwriting on the album is what caught me first – despite the heart-on-the-sleeve emo lyrics, the band never slips into the trap of cheesiness or cringey teenage poetry. Self-deprecating, but not self-pitying. There are so many clever little turns of phrase on this album that I wound up reading most of the lyrics while listening.

Here’s a quote from lead singer Erik Button in that Brooklyn Vegan about the album that I think nails the lyrical tone perfectly:

I had a pile of stories to pull from when writing this album that were examples of things from my past that seemed completely normal until I grew up and realized just how surreal growing up in a smaller town can be. Things like getting a gun for your 12th birthday, the baptist church that ran a haunted house every October in the old meat packing plant, knowing more than one person that lost fingers to Unregulated South Carolinian fireworks, etc. etc. etc. At the top of the list was the fact that when I was 7 years old one of our school field trips was to a factory that produced cigarettes. This is a memory so strange that I thought for sure I made it up since it also happens in an old episode of South Park but after reaching it turns out that until 1998 schools in my part of the state did field trips there so I wasn’t crazy after all.

As someone who grew up in a small town in Northern Ontario, I can fully relate.

It’s clear that these songs were written with the live performance first in mind. The production is loose and noisy, and some songs sound like they were recorded off the floor in one take. The title track and the one that follows it on the album run together in a kind of punk-rock-Meatloaf-opera thing that has about four different sing-along sections. I can’t wait to see it live.

Button just seems like a guy you’d like to spend a day farting around with:

I didn’t even get to the older stuff! It’s good and you should listen to it too:

On the DICE page for the show next week, part of the ‘about’ section reads “…nothing ever really does get easier. Things get different.” I’ve said that verbatim a thousand times.

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