**** Verbena

SOULS FOR SALE

(Merge)

Given that they had an EP and an album on Superchunk's label, it's no wonder that early on the rock-and-roll quartet Verbena got misunderstood as an indie-pop band. It doesn't help that they sorta look like Royal Trux might in one of those shredded-wheat commercials where the hucksters melt away 30 years right there in their clothes. The soiled-angel harmonies of guitarist-vocalists Anne Marie Griffin and Scott Bondy fit the same way, as if their bodies weren't quite big enough for the gritty gutter weariness and slinky sand-blasted vistas their ruckus conjures up. But somewhere on Souls for Sale -- everywhere, actually -- this oversized worldliness, filled out with swaggering licks and ratty tubescream chords brazenly bluffing their way into the R&B-fueled junk-rock hall of fame right between the Stooges and the Stones, becomes a defiant leap of self-invention. "Let's just pretend that we're real," Griffin and Bondy leer at each other on the album's last song, "Kiss Yourself," as if that were as close as one could get these days -- and was maybe too close at that.

-- Carly Carioli