Riverboat Gamblers - CD collection

[29-04-2025]

First and foremost. It's Riverboat Gamblers. Not THE Riverboat Gamblers. There's no "The" in the name, no matter what whatever streaming service, wikipedia or last.fm say, and I will die on this hill.

Riverboat Gamblers are a band from Texas that goes very far back with me. They played on the first show I ever went to on my own without my parents, opening for Sum 41 on the Eastpak Antidote Tour in Neu-Isenburg in December of 2010, together with Georgia pop punk band Veara and Jim Lindberg's, at the time, new melodic hardcore band The Black Pacific. But even before that, I was already familiar with them, through the soundtrack of the PSP racing game FlatOut: Head On, to which they lent their song True Crime. I don't actually know much about the band themselves, why they did what they did, who they are as people (aside from the fact that frontman Mike Wiebe likes the swing around the mic like a lasso), but I can tell you about the music.

Early in their career, the first row of albums in the photo, they played quick and dirty punk rock. Honestly, I'm not crazy about these. They're fine, but it's nothing you haven't heard before. The reason I tracked down these CDs is cause back in the day, my collector's spirit had already been awakened, but at the time I only knew like three bands, so that collector's spirit was laser focused on those. I'm happy I got them for completion, but if I got into the band today, I probably wouldn't have bothered with these.

Where I think it gets more interesting is with the 2006 album To the Confusion of Our Enemies. They largely still play the same quick and dirty punk rock, but the songwriting had improved to a point where nearly all their songs became instantly memorable, and the rough but melodic vocal style is supplemented with an absolutely incredible use of gang shouts, not too much, just peppered in at the right spots, that gave their songs an incredible feeling of communal passion and the energy of a freight train. This is also where the aforementioned song True Crime comes from, which is a perfect showcase of all these elements. In addition to that, their compositions also got a bit more of a wider range, from the post-punky Black Nothing of a Cat, to the ripping saxophone on Year of the Rooster.

On the next album, 2009s Underneath the Owl, they make quite a shift into a more clean indie rock sound. Still some punk rock on there, but it's much cleaner and more melodic. The album shows a great variety in songwriting, but most importantly, this is where they're showing their pop chops, with songs like the lead single A Choppy Yet Sincere Apology being a rock solid, bouncy and radio-suitable pop rock song. Although this is by far the cleanest the band has sounded yet, the album does at times play with compression to give it a bit of a garage rock feel, which is introducing a permanent shift in their sound from this point on. The standard edition of the album is the one in the digipack, the jewel case one being the Japanese release, which comes with an extra booklet, an OBI strip and two bonus tracks, although the bonus tracks are just repeats from the previous album. This album cycle actually does have unused b-sides that could've made a great bonus for the JP release, but unfortunately, instead these tracks are included only on the only CD singles the band had ever released, the aforementioned Choppy, and the closing track on the album, Victory Lap.

Their next release was the EP Smash/Grab in 2011, which returns to a much rougher lo-fi sound, with much more garage rock stylings than their previous albums, particularly noticeable in the riffage and the straight, stomping beat of the title track. This EP was released with no wider distribution, so this was quite possibly my first ever experience of paying international shipping fees for the privilege to get my hands on about 10 minutes of music.

Their to date final album, released a year later in 2012, is The Wolf You Feed. Initially, this one was a bit of a disappointment for me. It's less immediately catchy, not quite as bouncy and not all that fast either. It's sonically pretty dark and leans much more into the garage rock sound established on previous albums, coming through largely in its compressed, lo-fi production and its beats. But there's still fun to be had, especially the first half of the record has a good number of punchy, fast and melodic tunes, but over the years, the sound and atmosphere of the album has really grown on me and I think the album really shines through it's bleak darkness. Standout slower tracks are the atmospheric but deeply self-loathing Comedians, and the painfully slow dirge of Gallows Bird. In the second half of the album you find more highlights, particularly the very nervous sounding Blue Ghosts with its driving, constant beat, and the catchy, yet desperate Heart Conditions, both of which with interconnected music videos that drive home the paranoia of the songs. Blue Ghosts also showed up in some racing game again. Need for Speed? Forza? Something like that. All the other CDs I got in the early 2010s, this is the only one I was missing until now. At the time of the album's release, I had started collecting vinyl records and bought the album on that format. But when I sold my records a few years ago to focus back on CDs, I was left with an incomplete collection.

Since then, the band hasn't released any more albums, although they continue to be active until this day and put out the occasional single over the years, in which they have largely stuck to the garage rock style they moved into in the early 2010s. However, all of these releases are vinyl and digital exclusive, so there's unfortunately nothing to get for me here. Riverboat Gamblers have never been at the absolute top of my favourite bands, but they've been there for me since the very beginning of independently developing my music taste and starting to get interested in collecting, so I would consider them an often forgotten, but still integral part of my journey.