The first mental images to come to the brain of the average Joe or Jane when mentioning Omaha, Nebraska, would likely be cornfields as far as the eye can see, Johnny Carson, steaks, a world zoo, Mutual of Omaha Insurance or tortured songsmith Conor Oberst. Now, if you happen upon a fan of the whacked out sub-genre of rock that I like to call surf Billy garage rock, Omaha conjures one prominent spector: the band that is Brimstone Howl.

With one of the many severe thunderstorms to shit on Missouri in the last few weeks raging outside my office window, I felt it was the opportune time to stay up into the wee hours of the morning, risk electrocution at my computer and review Brimstone Howl’s latest We Came In Peace. Actually, the conditions are perfect for a critique of this record; the weather is violent and unrelenting, reminiscent of those old Hammer Studios horror flicks from the 1950s and 1960s, add to that the creepy Jim Diamond of Detroit garage gods The Dirt Bombs production (Peace sounds a bit like it was recorded at the bottom of a metal trash can in a well at the very back of an immense cavern) and Peace, though ironically named, could easily be its soundtrack.

There are many moments of eerie greatness to be found here. The songwriting, delivery, setup and all around raw slickness of the songs are not unlike the gems on the classic Nuggets compilation. Every track has flashes of this, all made nearly perfect by the manically fantastic lead guitar savagery of Nick Waggoner. His wicked slide and effects drenched flamethrower is especially prominent on the track “Child Of Perdition”, a roadhouse jam that bows to Chuck Berry as much as it does X’s Billy Zoom. In fact, it could quite possibly be some of the best playing in rock and “They Call Me Hopeless Destroyer” is open nerve blues like Jack White used to play before he spread himself thin jamming in 47 different bands. Complimenting the guitar chops is vocalist/ guitarist John Ziegler. What stands out most for me about Zeigler on this record is not his playing, though it is topnotch, is his vocals. He is a strange alien creature mix of the late Lux Interior, John Doe and the swagger of a juvenile delinquent from The Blackboard Jungle if said delinquent would have had access to LSD and William S. Burroughs novels.

Perhaps the best thing about Peace is that, with it, Brimstone Howl are at the very least attempting to bring rock back to its blues, rebellious and bare boots, raw roots. Just like The Ramones did in the 1970’s, Howl borrowing from 1960’s groups like The Shirelles, The Shangri-Las and The Ronettes to hone a sound that is as much a tribute as it is original. Goddamn, there’s even a song on the disc named “Shangri La”. If that isn’t a apparent case of fandom I don’t know what is.

The only crystal clear ape of any bands on this disc is the track “Easy to Dream”. If they could have gotten Sweet Lou Reed to do (I won’t say sing) the lines, it could have been sold as a companion piece to “Venus In Furs” and The Doors exorcism that is “The World Will Never Know.” But is that a crime? Borrowing from your heroes? Burying you enemies in flattery? Brimstone Howl are one of the best of the new crop of garage punks that loot and pillage music history like so many guitar wielding Vikings. It’s clear that they walk in the footsteps of their forefathers but luckily they don’t seem content to merely be a cover band like some others that shall remain nameless here.

The drumming of Calvin Retzlaff is pounding, stick splintering playing at it’s finest. He is Dick Dale with a drum set instead of a Strat. The first sound the listener hears on Peace is the steady, lightning fast, flaw free time and it only gets more aggressive with every progressive track thereafter. The bass of Chauncey Patton is as dense as a trucker’s midnight cup of coffee. In short, the band is in top form, showing an improved confidence since 2007 Guts of Steel. They mix the different elements within the band expertly. There’s slower tracks (“Easy To Dream”), speedy blues numbers (“Catamite Blues”, “They Call Me Hopeless Destroyer”) and the just plan weird random tune (“The World Will Never Know”).

Brimstone Howl are like the strange friend that lives in his mom’s basement and talks at length about UFOs, The Twilight Zone, going to Buenos Aires and government conspiracies. As you sit there listening you think to yourself, “this cat is totally fucked in the head. I should split.” But you don’t. You sit there, you listen, you get sucked in because, after awhile, it starts making sense. That’s what it’s like listening to We Came in Peace. This Omaha band is the crop circles, Bigfoot, ghosts and alien abductions of rock; a far out phenomenon that gathers steam and a flock of new believers the more their name is whispered. Brimstone Howl… Brimstone Howl…… Brimstone Howl……..

Dedicated to those songs that I can’t stop playing, humming, or thinking about; the 4+ minutes you fall head-over-heels in love with. Past instances have included The Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” The White Stripes’ “We’re Going To Be Friends,” and The Arctic Monkeys’ “From the Ritz to the Rubble.”

I have an addictive personality and this fuels the need I feel to deny myself happiness. That’s not to say I’m a particularly unhappy person. Rather I mean I consciously hold off on overdoing it. “It” being “things that I enjoy so much that I could spend seven hours a day re-experiencing them and the remaining ten hours fixating on them.” I deny myself these doses of happiness sometimes in order to stay productive, or at least in an effort to appear productive, even when I’m not doing particularly productive things. So when I feel like watching a movie, I’ll watch whatever Netflix movie I have instead of re-watching The Empire Strikes Back, even though I’ve been thinking about it every day since re-re-watching it a week ago. I may have inherited this self-inflicted denial from my parents, from a semi-conservative Methodist upbringing, or maybe I got it specifically from my friend Kurt who claimed he only watched the Star Wars trilogy on his birthday, so “he wouldn’t wear them out.”

I have a few pop-culture fixations, and then there are fetishes. Star Wars is one fetish. The Rolling Stones are another, and odd as it may seem the latter have disappointed me far less than the former in recent years. Such is the benefit of living after the prime years only to leave those great lost non-radio tracks for discovery, like some lazy archeologist who managed to find something wonderful by one of the most popular acts in the last 60 years. If I allowed myself the luxury, this column would turn into a testing ground for a book titled “Greatest Rolling Stones Song At This Moment,” and it would be a 700-page encyclopedia going song by song, examining such well worn territory that could only be enjoyed by other mutually fixated fans like “man, these guitars are awesome” and “can we please dedicate 10 pages worth of love for Keith Richards’ bass for ‘Sympathy for the Devil’?” It would sell seven copies, and it would become synonymous with the bargain bookstores as that Second City book.

So you see what a heroic figure I become by denying my more base instincts and forcing myself to deal with matters that might benefit society, such as washing the dishes or pretending I want to listen to Tori Amos. But, as the quote from Pulp Fiction goes, that ain’t the truth. The truth is I’m the weak. I fell off the wagon and went crazy this week and listened nearly exclusively to not just one particular era of the Stones (the Brian Jones one) and not just the music of one particular year in their catalog (1968), but two particular songs from that era and year: “Child of the Moon” and “Prodigal Son”. If I could’ve gotten my act together earlier, we all would have enjoyed a nice treatise on top quality hippie pseudo-intellectual lyrics and how this B-Side to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” might have made for the greatest released single of all time. But I didn’t. Instead I got the car’s oil changed and so here we are, left with the only song capable of topping “Child of the Moon.”

If I would have denied myself the pleasure I sought, we wouldn’t be here either. I would have latched on to “Child of the Moon” and said, “That’s it. I’m un-clicking all of ‘Between the Buttons’ and anything else I just found out would work on the computer (my old Mac wouldn’t play those newer, remastered versions of the Abkco releases; but the new one? Damn right)… and I’m just focusing on this first song so I can get on with my life. My life of pretending I am a well-rounded, open-minded person who seeks new experiences because he hasn’t found the sound that perfectly fits his life and lightens his every step.” But I didn’t. I sort of did, but I didn’t. I allowed for “Child” to release its grip just enough to let another song from the same band sneak in there and nest. “Child of the Moon” was the gateway to harder stuff, and now I’m addicted to my addiction again.

The main reason I try to actively deny myself such pleasures is an attempt to appear cool, or at least cooler than I am. Do you know how many times I get asked about the Rolling Stones in an average day? Zero. Nobody’s asking. It’s all been said a million times before. There’s gotta be countless books on each album, each track, each guitar string so everybody’s sick of it. There’s nothing left to say. So if this week I opened my mouth every time I thought about this song or this band — which was a lot, I assure you — I would have repelled potential friends faster than if I’d been sharpening a bloody cleaver. And even if I had been going on and on about a band that my conversation partners enjoyed, I would still have gone on and on at a ridiculous level. This is fanship. It is blind and unwavering and socially crippling.

As with many of their catalog, I’ve loved “Prodigal Son” for quite a while, though I’d be lying if I said it was a love-on-first-listen track. It rests in an undesirable spot on Beggars Banquet; the six hole. In American League baseball, this might be where you’d park your .245-with-some-power shortstop. It’s also track two on side two. It’s on the back half of the album, but it’s not the closer. It follows one of the album’s singles and side openers (”Street Fighting Man”) and is book-ended by one of the band’s more erotic original tunes, whereas “Prodigal” is a cover of the Rev. John Wilkins song. But here we are. Deep in it.

If I could offer the Stones some late-in-their-days career advice, it would be to include covers songs on every album. True, I would make this recommendation to every band I could, but with the Stones it’s particularly apropos, because as great as they are at song writing, their true strength is in their song performing. They were never tremendously innovative — at least not at the level of some of their more prolific contemporaries — but they were always great at making rock ‘n’ roll. Something about those dirty Brits clicks when they’re channeling black American songs. You can feel a group smile in every one of their Chuck Berry covers, and if you look at their best album, work every one has at least one cover (with the possible exception of Aftermath, but who would really trade that for, say, Sticky Fingers?). For the Stones, these covers work to remind them more than anyone else of why they do what they do. These were the songs that inspired them a hundred years ago, and that reminder works for the listener as well. When utilized properly, they serve to push the agenda of each album, and on Beggars Banquet, that agenda was to get back to country-blues style music, and that’s just what “Prodigal Son” does better than any other song on the disc.

Free from the burden of artistic creation, the band can simply play the song however they like. This includes vocal work from Jagger unlike any of the band’s hits. There’s no bratty “Satisfaction” or whimpering “Wild Horses”. This is something else. And maybe I wasn’t paying close attention, but I only caught the clever build to “Prodigal” upon what must have been my 250th listen in the last two days. The song starts very delicately, with a pin-prick guitar lick over the rhythm strum. It’s very beautiful and precise, yet simple enough to serve as a motif for the rest of the song. That lick emerges all through the song, yet by the end everyone’s bashing rather than picking. This is a typical Stones technique — one starts, another joins and the rest all pile on — but I’ve never noticed it so little until this song. By the end, we still have everything we started with, but it feels like a completely different style of play. The theme of the title character and the song itself seems to be “How’d we get here?”

In a great lecture from the TED series, writer Elizabeth Gilbert discussed the history of human interpretation of “genius” and how it started as a communal channeling of greatness rather than the modern incarnation, which is placed on a single person. Basically, you have to be in the right place at the right time for good stuff to come through you instead of being a genius which means you have to always make the place and time you’re at the right one. A performance like “Prodigal” feels like that kind of channeling, and it might even explain much of the Stones’ career success: they were great rock interpreters, so they put themselves in positions to interpret greatly.

If it’s possible, I just wrote the world’s first spoiler for a song because I’m not sure anyone would’ve noticed this without my mentioning it, but if they would, then I’ve ruined it. But then who pays attention to these types of things like I do? This is what I do and who I am — I tie my favorite band playing a cover song to the writer of “Eat, Pray, Love” just so I can keep talking about them a little longer. By this point in my life, I must have thought about this song more than the men who actually played the song, perfectly defining my psychosis.

There is really just one thing necessary to cover Chuck Berry: the ability to absolutely obliterate a roots rock guitar solo. M. Ward took on “Roll Over Beethoven” during an encore set at Coachella and left no riff unturned. If anybody is rolling over in their grave, it’s definitely not Mr. Berry.

Dedicated to those songs that I can’t stop playing, humming, or thinking about; the 4+ minutes you fall head-over-heels in love with. Past instances have included The Groovie Ghoulies’ “I’m Doin’ Fine,” Electric Six’s “Improper Dancing,” and Tender Box’s “Spectacular Spider-Man Theme.”

I don’t buy music every week, so when I go shopping I often pick up more than one album at a time. This is great and stupid, because while the one-stop shopping is an economic use of my time, I end up unfairly comparing two unrelated, dissimilar albums. If I’d purchased The Velvet Underground’s first album on its own without the accompanying purchase of Van Halen II, I have a higher opinion of it today. When I bought the pair — for whatever reason — I couldn’t get into the trippy stylings of the Velvets because I was head over kicked heels for VH II. Since then I have grown and adapted from my initial impression, realizing it was unfair: Not only is Velvet decidedly overrated and more than a little dated, but the run of the final three songs of VH II (”D.O.A.,” “Women in Love” and “Beautiful Girls”) are better than anything Lou Reed could pretend to care about writing. Velvet Underground can’t touch VH II’s ass-less chaps.

This comparison trend of mine was tested again when I received the dual gift of the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible along with The Faces‘ A Nod Is As Good as a Wink… To a Blind Horse, and if I’d been placing bets, I would have put it all down on the boozy bar rock of Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. Chuck Berry covers, dirty riffs, sexism… Wink is like a Stones cover album and should have swept me off my feet. I promised myself I’d listen to both albums all the way through once before allowing myself the privilege (or the handicap) of repeated listens. Wink won the first listen of the pair (which was chosen at random — I try to do these things fair since I understand my own psychosis better anyone).

But then I moved on to Neon Bible, which started with “Black Mirror”, and I forgot all about rooster hair cuts.

“Black Mirror” — in fact much of Neon Bible — is a fantastic musical creation forged from the qualities I find annoying in bands I don’t usually enjoy. The overt sincerity of U2, the airy musicality of the Talking Heads, the sing-it-to-Saturn of Bruce Springsteen, the symphonic back-up of Coldplay. Maybe it’s a ratio thing: I can’t get past these annoying bits with these bands because their music seems to offer little else. If things were more evened out, maybe I could actually manage to get through Achtung Baby. But somehow when these qualities join together in this Arcade Fire configuration, it sounds like the kind of noise that could consume the world.

At the risk of outing myself as a hack, “Black Mirror” is a classic example of an album launcher. Some Track One’s start an album only to get out of the way, and others announce the album’s presence and tell everyone to get on board fast. “Black Mirror” possesses an unrelenting drive, feeling at once out of control — like a stagecoach headed by rocket elephants — yet fully aware of where it’s heading. It may be aiming for a cliff, but it knew that from the start. The Arcade Fire have a major Bowie thing happening with most of their work, and that would be a hindrance if they didn’t wear it so well. One review of “Black Mirror” compared it to a reworking of the “Suffragette City” riff, but that misses the point. The song may cosmetically sound a little like “Suffragette”, but the culmination of all those textures brings intensity, depth, darkness and hope along with them. If anything, it feels like “Heroes”. Bittersweet, heartsick and romantic.

On the rare occasion I don’t repeat “Black Mirror” and actually allow another song the daunting task of following up, I half expect to hear Radiohead’s “The National Anthem”. This would theoretically fit the mood, but where Kid A is an experiment in anti-music, “Black Mirror” is about music-music. It’s as pro-music as you can get. Kid A is clinical and shattered, Neon Bible is lush and voluptuous. Radiohead tends to write music to comment on music itself, but there’s no barrier separating you from the emotions and excitement of The Arcade Fire. Neon Bible gives a million of these kinds of emotional payoffs, but “Black Mirror” demonstrates them in the kind of way that tells you everything you’d ever want to know about the band, or hope to find.

Tension runs through the entire song, and it’s never released, only eased. The singing, instruments and song entirely build up to a cliff before “falling” into the chorus once again. Each verse is a remount back up that hill. The best example of this comes right in the middle. We build and build with the lyrics, and that familiar piano lick trickles in late enough to remind us it’s there and to keep us climbing. Then the lyric doesn’t lead directly into the chorus, but takes us to the “That curse is never broken” section, and it doesn’t get broken for many measures after. Win Butler suddenly breaks into a French version of the titular chorus, deftly giving the song a plateau but still no free-fall into the dark waters beneath. The backing vocals rise to the forefront after the full orchestra takes us through the chorus once again. “The kiss is never broken,” and neither is this rhythm. Butler talks to his mirror as everything seems to crescendo until we finally hit the water and gasp for air.

Individually as pieces, the music isn’t complicated at all. It’s a simple rhythm guitar lick, straight-forward drums, bass line, piano lick. That’s where the true power of the song originates: it’s not inventing new wheels to play with. It’s using all the wheels we already knew were available in a way we could only hope to achieve. The placement of these elements shows mastery. “Black Mirror” is one of those songs that is so good and so consuming and so powerful and so magnificent that you can’t imagine a single person in the free world who wouldn’t enjoy it. This is the curse of music loving — of course there’s someone out there who won’t like it, and even worse there are some who will simply dismiss it as, “Yeah… that’s alright.” I can understand not liking something completely, but when a song like this demands the kind of respect and attention it so obviously does, a mere dismissal like that would result in glove-to-face slaps in a more gentile era.

“Black Mirror” marks a year’s worth of Greatest Song at This Moment articles, and I’m thrilled beyond words that I can continue to enjoy this song without having to uphold my self-imposed moratorium on each artist I consume. If anyone wonders about the thesis of this project (i.e. “Trying to answer WHY these songs are so great at these moments”), I have no better answer concerning “Black Mirror” than I would for Van Halen II. The answer is: They’re the best.

Watch the “Black Mirror” video.