Michael Rank's guitar work is intelligent and inspired. He snaps out of dreamy, reverbed riffs throughout "Apache" to return with shards of dissonance, his bent strings putting the immediacy and intensity in place during one of Ensslin's more reserved attempts. His playing comes packed with echoes of the Pacific Northwest, too: the feedback reckoning of Mike McCready creeps in for "Crush," and the chorded crunch of Mark Arm slams down full-throttle during "Straw Dog." During "Salt," it sounds as though Soundgarden's Kim Thayil is listed in the album credits, but--moments later--the guitars shift into a solo that nearly any teenager with a Fender could identify as being the immortal "Stairway to Heaven" break. The echoes are occasionally overbearing, but as Ensslin puts it during the same song, "All God's children wanna rock and roll."
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