Marah: Kids In Philly : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Recorded mostly in a makeshift studio atop an auto-body shop in South Philadelphia, the second album from Marah lives and breathes the streets where it was made. Kids in Philly is a disciplined collection about fractured romance. From the opening "Faraway You," brothers Serge and David Bielanko set a scene of urban Rust Belt desolation -- just before he discovers he's been jilted, the narrator sits on a bus watching snow falling on a discarded mattress. Later, on "It's Only Money, Tyrone," the singer itemizes the crap that people have thrown into a river as he thinks about karmic debris. Discarding the urban-country-dude attitude they dished on their 1998 debut, Marah use throttling guitars and banjo and slide to tell stories of misfits who fish from bridges in dangerous neighborhoods ("The Catfisherman") or to talk about how the city looks when you're suddenly alone. Marah do some borrowing to support these narratives -- their paraphrase of the E Street Shuffle on "My Heart Is the Bums on the Street" is eerily perfect. But Kids in Philly is anchored in the blood-and-guts real world rather than in any other band's music. At a time when the specific sense of place has vanished from most rock songwriting, Marah pick up the manic energy and unspoken hostilities simmering just below the surface of city life and channel them into music that's full of grand, Whitman-esque wonder and gnarly Lou Reed detail. (RS 842)

TOM MOON