Those Peabodys are based in Austin, Texas, a town well-known for the quality of its wide-open musical scene. The band's recent decline from four-piece to duo (Adam Hatley on guitar and vocals, Clarke Wilson handling vocals and bass) hasn't stopped them from producing a blazing package of rock-n-roll fun. Even battling through ten songs in 28 minutes, Those Peabodys don’t merely craft song fragments. Each song flows into the next as if the album was a single long track, but it’s not repetitious -- there’s more than enough musical variety here to hold your attention. With only four hands available to play instruments, the music is opened up, leaving plenty of silent space in the midst of the power-duo jamming. Wilson and Hatley occasionally trade lead vocals, adding to the free-form tone of the album.

Lyrically, it’s hard to tell what Those Peabodys are on about. There’s a certain amount of cars/girls/rock-n-roll, like "Judie"’s insistent "She’s my girl" refrain. Darker words crop up in some songs, such as the anguished mantra "Why’s the party always at my house?" in the aptly-titled "Party at My House". Although "Party..." is the next-to-last track, it’s also the album’s centerpiece, a (relatively) long, shifting song that unleashes a jump-up-to-get-down beat before moving slowly through a Fugazi-styled guitar/drums passage to a revved-up ending. The pattern is immediately and almost perfectly duplicated in the last track, cheekily titled "Negro Spiritual".

"Too Quick" and "Party at My House" both bear traces of Elvis Costello's sharp post-punk (think "Pump it Up"), while "Hazzard Co." -- yes, it really is a song about Bo and Luke -- careens around like a drunken Grifters tune. Those Peabodys don't rely on influences to carry them, though, and they manage to rock in a way that’s all their own. It's a perfect way to spend half an hour.