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By Brian Tucker

There are fun and stark qualities to Try Our Delicious Half Chicken, a new release from two local bands.

The cassette and digital release featured music from the one man band of Deadly Lo-Fi that has fun with a garage and spooky sound and the duo of Sidewalk Babes which digs deep into an often whirling and nicely brooding sound.

Try Our Delicious Half Chicken features five tracks from Sidewalk Babes and four by Deadly Lo-Fi. Murky with a rough and tumble sound, both groups deliver solid hooks on songs. The split release was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Deadly Lo-Fi’s Travis Burdick.

Deadly Lo-Fi’s “True Love and Murder” has a cabaret vibe with smoky, howling sounding saxophone against boom/crash drumming. Burdick performs with a punker’s creakiness and the delivery of a carnival barker. “I Want it All” is slow burning rave-up with prickly guitar and a guttural refrain of “I know, I know, I know.”

“The Stalker Love Song” is relentless, heated by burning saxophone throughout. It sounds like a traditional country song done as a hard driving garage rock tune about someone taking another. Burdick sings, “you’re the one for me” and “you know our love is forever.”

Sidewalk Babes’ tunes are more internal, namely their track “Grey” in which singer-guitarist Joshua O’Hara really drives home the lyric “Why I am so scared?” There’s a breezy, drunken feeling to “Crazy” and the electrified microphone vocals on “Claustrophobia” add strangely welcomed atmosphere.

“Whore-O-Florm” is a standout track by the duo with its shadowy feel, steady tempo and deadly snarl. O’Hara’s vocals cut through the haunting vibe, like a swimmer fighting to stay afloat. He comes off like a gentler Glenn Danzig and not just because of the song’s eerie qualities. It’s the crooner texture he lends the song, only with fewer fangs. It’s delivered over creepy cool guitar playing while David Rodriguez’s drumming rumbles like a slow train leaving an old country town.

Cassettes can be had at Gravity Records and ordered online via Weiner Records and there will be copies available locally.