The Brady Bastards Reviews:

By: Nick R. Scalia, Staff Writer
Play Mag New Haven CT

They're a classic power trio, they dig gritty old-school punk, and they claim to be the illegitimate spawn of a sitcom family that certainly wouldn't have allowed any Circle Jerks records into their household.
Meet the Brady Bastards, three rock-damaged children of the tv generation whose songs are almost as sharp as their matching striped shirts. They've just released their debut full-length, titled The Deep End, on Connecticut-based Sling Slang Records, and it's an album that both confirms their nerd-rock image with catchy pop-punk songs about snow globes and internet dating, and entertainingly pushes past it on both harder-edged tunes and more mature, reflective compositions.
"With the name of the band and us all wearing the striped shirts, people consider us kind of a goof, but there's more depth to it, too," says Greg Brady (nee Gilroy), the band's lead singer and bassist. That's pretty easy to pick out on a trip through The Deep End, on which Greg - along with guitarist Shawn (Finney) Brady and drummer Darryl (Long) Brady - tears through several styles and subject matter both infectiously dorky and intriguingly serious, from bouncy three-chord singalongs to hardcore-tinged metal, from jokey sendups of boozing to heart-tugging remembrances of close family.
Greg attributes the band's genre-bending to the stuff the three members (all local residents - Greg and Sean from Connecticut, Darryl commuting to band practice from nearby Brewster, N.Y.) grew up listening to. For him, it was gritty late 80s/early 90s punk and hardcore from The Descendants to the Dead Milkmen, while Darryl dug alt-rockers like Depeche Mode and Wilco and Shawn leaned toward big, hooky classic rock acts. How these guys get along without slapfighting about their record collections is a mystery, but it all comes together extremely agreeably on the album - tracks like Strawberry Girl and She's Online grab for geeky power-pop glory; Breathe Again recalls the acid-dipped guitar grooves of R.E.M.'s Monster album; See You When I Get There and Drown With Me are slower, more emotional rockers; Can't Stop the Blood is a blistering rap-metal middle-finger to censorship; and E D S F (it stands for "Eat, Drink, Smoke, F--") is a jagged, thrashy ode to excess that would make Greg's sloppy punk and hardcore forebears very proud.
And the bandmembers are all further unified by their self-appointed Brady brotherhood, which brings to mind another band of pseudo-siblings. "It's definitely an homage to the Ramones, where they all wore the leather jackets and they all took the last name Ramone," Greg explains, though he admits the band name actually wasn't any of their ideas.
"It's a name that one of my cousins threw at me - he was goofing on the names of punk bands, and he happened to say The Brady Bastards... and I thought, that's kind of a cool name - let's all get matching striped shirts!
"Our original promos were like, Carol and Mike had three other children that they didn't want, so they didn't take them along for the show... we're those kids."
As youthful as the trio sounds, though, they've actually been around a bit longer than they let on; belying their exuberant punk energy, all three are actually in their '30s. Greg and Darryl met in junior high school, and started playing music together soon after - "Me and Darryl were actually in marching band together, we were total band geek nerds," Greg says proudly. Both drifted in and out of bands for the next decade or so, and meanwhile Greg met the future Shawn Brady at a Rocky Horror show in the early '90s. "I used to play in a hardcore band back then, and Shawn comes from this real arena-rock background, like Jethro Tull, Triumph, stuff like that," Greg remembers, laughing. "He came down and checked out my band, and I saw him at Rocky Horror the next week and he proceeded to sit down and tell me everything wrong with the band I was in. And I was like, 'f-- you, pal, my band's great' - but he asked me to join his band and that's how [our partnership] started out, playing real pop-oriented, classic rock stuff."
The Bastards finally came together in 2003, and signed to Sling Slang with only a three-song demo to their credit. While the early material hewed much closer to the poppy sound one might expect from a band inspired by the Ramones and named after a '70s pop culture icon, as they began to collect songs for an LP, their darker and more intricate musically-varied material began to emerge. According to the band's frontman, fans of the Bastards' serious side have a lot more of that to look forward to - "Down the line you're gonna see a lot more serious subject matter, we're trying to stay away from so much of the comical-type stuff... this album is really poppy but I think the next one is gonna be really freaking dark - but, you know, it depends on where the mood takes us, I guess.
To see the band live, Greg says, is probably the best way to understand where they're coming from. "What's cool about it is that the reason we did the name and the shirts and the goofiness, it kinda draws people in, and then once they hear they song they go, 'ok, we get it.' We write serious stuff, but the three of us are a bunch of goofs, we don't take ourselves that seriously - we just like to have people have a good time at our shows."
And despite the band's conceptual goofiness, they've been able to share the stage with some very serious acts - like veteran old-school punkers Murphy's Law, who the Bradys played with at Hartford's Webster Underground. "They're a great band and a major influence on us, and that show was a really good mix," Greg says. "I don't think we're as extreme party guys as they are, though - I think that was the most drunk I've ever been on stage in my life, but, you know, you hang out with Murphy's Law, you've got to drink."
And although the Brady Bastards may be ready to explore their harder musical edges, fans can expect them to retain at least a little bit of their nerd-rock style - if for nothing else than health reasons. "The screaming is killing me," Greg says, apparently hinting that full-on metal is not in his band's future. "I went to Ozzfest a few weeks back and I have no idea how those guys do it."

Smother.net
his isn’t your ‘70’s television show Brady’s. Instead they’re rock-n-roll giants who love to crush little boy’s fantasies of being a rock star with a babe on each arm at the Playboy Mansion—yes I’m referring to Weezer. “The Deep End” isn’t cerebral and doesn’t try to do anything more than just rock it out at high volumes. Their songs might be easy-going but it’s hard to write perfect beer-swilling tunes that could shake the garage practice space up this much. So damn it go check them out already!
- J-Sin