Washington Post posted a CD review of “How To Call A Bluff”, check it out:
CD Review: My Favorite Highway “How To Call A Bluff” Kindred spirits: the Knack, the Who, Fountains of Wayne
There’s something of the Knack in My Favorite Highway. The song “Simple Life” opens the Northern Virginia quartet’s debut CD, “How to Call a Bluff,” with storming chords and a swaggering call-and-response treatment of one of singer-guitarist David Cook’s favorite words: “So.” Thirty years ago, when “My Sharona” was a hit, music with this sort of energy, directness and unabashed tunefulness was called power-pop.
“How to Call a Bluff,” a remixed and expanded version of the CD the band self-released last year, continues in that mode on a couple of more tunes: “Go” and “Say So.” The latter sounds more than a bit like Fountains of Wayne, but where that group is known for wit and irony, My Favorite Highway is more earnest, especially when Cook switches to keyboards. The album’s mood begins to shift with the piano-driven “Getaway Car,” which is as punchy as its predecessors but more grandiose.
A bruised romantic, Cook eulogizes lost love in string-augmented power ballads such as “Bittersweet Life,” which shows some spirit by rhyming “calling your bluff” with “burning your stuff.” If amour has been rough on Cook, he’s still a believer: “Bigger Than Love” insists that nothing is. Some of these numbers border on maudlin, but even when love is a downer, My Favorite Highway’s power-pop is reliably upbeat.
– Mark Jenkins
Credits: Washington Post
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