All Music Guide ***½

Having come together from two separate bands with their own cachet, VHS or Beta and Boom Bip, respectively, Zeke Buck and Matt Johnson likely felt a little pressure to come up with something that could match those group's efforts. Funny thing about People Noise's debut album Ordinary Ghosts -- they might well have exceeded those earlier efforts already. If the approach of drummer and person-who-does-everything-else is now an established one in rock & roll, it's all about what one does with that approach, and Buck and Johnson make a great team, bringing in all the huge scope that the current indie rock seems to love but also providing something too often left out: actual, loud guitars, smeary but still focused on stick-in-your-head riffs. Johnson's drumming is equally full-bodied, playing around with more than standard rock beats here and there but never anything less than commanding. Combined with the fact that Buck's singing is more contemplative/shoegaze instead of singalong drama club, it makes People Noise alternately a throwback or a welcome relief, but more accurately a bit of both. Without quite sounding like either one of them in specific, they're a pretty thorough recombination of any number of '90s group styles, with more than a little Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead (or more accurately those cherubic bands that enjoyed following in Radiohead's wake like Geneva and Kent -- though the piano and guitar start to "The Nothing Place" sure sounds like the source band in particular). As such, Ordinary Ghosts doesn't rewrite rules, but it does just plain rocks and sounds great. That's reason enough.