Where Our Failures Are, the first full-length from Brooklyn’s The New Dress and out now on Red Leader Records, is just great. It’s hard to really find any other way to describe it except “great”. They’re one of my favorite bands and the CD, which includes the five songs from the original demo, gets your toes tapping and your fists up in the air.

With a slightly beefier production than the demo, Where Our Failures Are doesn’t do anything to take away from the rawness of the single guitar, and the twin vocals of Bill and Laura, which is where their real strength comes from. The New Dress mix punk, folk, and just a dash of working-class heroism from the opening notes of “Setting Off Alarms” (one of my absolute favorites of theirs) to their Billy Bragg cover of “I Don’t Need…” to the closing notes of “Two Sweatshirts.” This is just the thing you need playing on the stereo when you’ve got a bottle of whiskey to kill and a couple of friends to help you do it.

It’s from the heart, and what’s not to love about that?