Love You Just the Same

Will Johnson has released more than 200 songs--spread over more than 13 albums, EPs, compilations, 7-inches, side-projects and solo records--since turning in his drumsticks to Dallas band Funland in 1996, and you start to sense what a Centro-matic shit storm might entail. Even more remarkable is the fact that each of the songs culled from the epic sessions is a keeper, a classic even. Taken together, they add up to the finest album yet by these celebrated working-class heroes of the TX underground. Veering from tattered, haunting folk dirges that sound like they wafted in directly from On the Beach to brutally catchy skronk anthems the likes of which have made Centro-matic the most reliably kick-ass live band in the Lone Star state, Love You Just the Same (named after one of the Johnson anthems that didn't make the cut) doesn't let up until the breathy ooh's of its towering closer "Without You" have melted into silence.