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Batmobile
-Stu Gibson Guana Batz Alongside fellow psychobilly ringleaders King Kurt, Guana Batz were always far more of a funtime Frankie collective than the chainsaw Charlie crews that crawled out the crack-den enclaves the likes of Demented Are Go and The Meteors frequented. Favouring a cleaner, more traditional though no less wild-eyed approach, this reissued second instalment (after debut Held Down To Vinyl…At Last!) of the attack of the killer Batz shows a band on top form, music-wise at least - let’s forget the dodgy Bermuda shorts they’d bequeath to Ted’s Bubonic Dirtbag and other late eighties indie idols – and should show the range the genre can be capable of. Despite being split slightly top-heavily in favour of covers due to the age-old pressures of trying to scribble a second album between constant touring, more than anything the life-blood of their ilk, the standard of Elvis Costello’s Radio Sweetheart and Springsteen’s I’m On Fire (complete with piss-taking Born In The USA style cover) add to this record’s deserved place in history, however small that be. Fairly straight covers of Chuck, Eddie Cochran and Johnny Burnette show amidst the self-penned quakers Pile Driver Boogie and I’m Weird this light-hearted meringue of mayhem could still hold court with the more self-consciously crazy practitioners of this fine art. - Stu Gibson
Black Magic Six
-Jeff
The
Come N’ Go
Oh aye, it was recorded in Memphis, the home of ‘uh huh yeahah’ and is probably better than the last one ‘2’, but which of you carny crack-pots narily cares, get ‘em both for an hour of hooter-honkin’ hoedown fun, apparently it’s the last time these devils’ll be riding out. Ahola! -Stu Gibson
Cowboy Prostitutes
-Jeff
The
Peacocks
- Stu Gibson
The Milestones
-Jeff
VARIOUS
ARTISTS Featuring an almost absurdly appropriate amount of songs (at sixteen), this sampler, as is their very nature, gives you a nice wee overview of the rightly vaunted Rounder label’s ever critically acclaimed cast of characters of the wider folk, as it were, world. Of critical concern you have Newfound Road, Uncle Earl, Slaid Cleaves and Peter Rowan and Tony Price to name but a mere quarter of the cast list. Basically stay away if the spine-scraping chill of a banjo or keening inconsolable claw of a fiddle causes offence. Also tread with caution if you prefer folk to literally come from nature itself and to sound like it was recorded in a hollowed out tree. While it isn’t the post something or other ironed on irony of Hayseed Dixie there are far worse things to find yourself shuddering at than the thought of a folk sampler, often examples of the all too often spotted twee-er variety. Though, while it offers a wide cross-section of a small portion of the roots music pie, for instance the continental village jazz meets rustic folk of April Verch, there still remain contenders for the coffee-table crown, such as Vienna Teng, but contrast that again with the more authentic Claire Lynch and Doyle Lawson and it’s worth a whimsical whirl while the sun’s shining through the branches. - Stu Gibson
REVEREND BEAT-MAN
- Stu Gibson
The Solace Bros.
rock songs like I prefer getting my rocks off, actually; you can keep your champagne bubble baths and sentimentality, just fuck me hard and fast and leave me panting like a dog. So this record by Tucson's The Solace Bros. didn't exactly leave me basking in the afterglow, needless to say. Like a weird indie-prog bastard son of, say, Styx and Nada Surf, it had enough lyrical hooks and catchy guitar bits to keep me momentarily entertained ("Dreaming For The World" is quite sweet and sunny, not to mention only 3 minutes long), but too many lengthy abstractions ("Certain Times" clocks in at 9 minutes, "It Might Be" a hefty 16) to warrant a Holly-recommendation. Their version of the old standard, "Frankie and Johnny," is pretty good despite its swirling proggishness, but the falsetto-ed last song, "It's The Right Thing To Do," sounds like it is being sung underwater by Fraggles. And you can't dance to it. If, however, you do get your rocks off to that sort of thing, by all means give this record a spin. I'll even let you have my copy if you want-I'm sweet like that. - Holly
Animal
Alpha
-Stu Gibson
Gene
Vincent
- Stu Gibson
The Joneses
-Jeff PS: I’ve got the thick slab o’ black wax edition; same six seminal songs, same hilariously self-deprecating back-cover liner notes from Jeff Drank and the Joneses’ sometimes-piano plinker Greg Kuehn, just bigger and bolder than the CD. Because CDs are sorta for pussies. It is obvious listening to the primal pleasures of Fix me and Croc Rock that these shambolic near-hoboes were the patient zeros of the entire dandy-sleaze movement. Students of chaos, here’s your masters. -Sleaze Absolution
-Sleaze A
Thousand Knives of Fire
-Jeff
The Creepy Creeps
Endeverafter
-Jeff
Thee Corsairs
Added bonus: furious bongo attack on “Swamp Ass”! -Sleaze |
N.F.D.
While lacking McCoy’s curious charisma that compelled even from the crackles of a record, White at least stays clear of trying to imitate his predecessor’s unique way with lyrical claptrap, sorry, Crowley-esque mysticism and occult lore. There’s more a sense of taking the cloying, entombed atmospheres of yore into the light, yet the palpable grip of tension and enticing ethereality is noticeably absent, leaving the overall effect in slightly stagnant waters. When The Sun Dies is a dandily floured-up slice of dancefloor drama, that should still see them Lords of their Devonshire (Arms) manor and on Senses Alive they rock the rigor mortis out of the earlier, pedestrian stabs at epic pretension, proving this incarnation should unleash the six-string storms, as praying ‘there must be some way out of here’ on Let It Rain isn’t exactly Last Exit For The Lost and The Unforgiven, for all it’s western themology, isn’t The Watchman. A worthwhile crucible of Nephi-lite worthy of investigation nevertheless, one that still shows these fallen angels are capable of enchanting rituals of sensory assault yet. -Stu Gibson The
Nicotine Fits Straight up, I’m just gonna go ahead and call ‘em The Nic Fits ‘cause it sounds better and rolls off my tongue like your little sister’s saliva. And straight out, this is some fine hipster hullabaloo with a whole lotta garage groove that will either sound like The Wipers, The Sonics, The Stooges, early Hellacopters, or The Vines depending on how hard you like to hit your tambourine. Any way you shake it though, there’s plenty of action on Like the Curse and my guess is someone’s little sister is on the dance floor at a Nic Fits show salivating just for you. -Jeff
Velvet Revolver While accusations of a supergroup mutual back-slapping if not back-sliding session was bound to meet a band featuring three ex-members of Guns N’Roses and a couple of ex-grungers, Velvet Revolver have resolutely stuck to the party line of being cleaned up rock gods come good. But do they deliver, especially with those accusations now becoming rumours of strife, splits and further rehab stints? Well, no, not really. Sure, everything’s in place but there’s no camaraderie, connectedness nor communication onstage, you could say the coolness goes so far as to be coldness. Motions are gone through slick and superficially if not superbly…the best moment of the evening came late on when one time Infectious Groover and Electric Love Hog Dave Kushner did a mightily impressive running jump from mid-stage to each corner, obviously having put soundcheck to good use. However, Mr Scott Weiland, once of sub-grunge laughing-stocks Stone Temple Pilots (and now once of VR it seems), is a sight to be sold, strutting around the stage like Bowie and Jagger chasing each other through rush hour traffic on the spaghetti junction alternately high on ketamine and whatever hell hotter than anything Hollywood could ever host they give elephants as aphrodisiacs. The songs, apart from current album opener Let It Roll would struggle to shine on a cheap compilation of the late eighties L.A. hairsprayed sleaze rawk that birthed Slash n’ co’s old band, updated slightly as they are with some Soundgarden or Mother Love Bone style Seattle stoner-psych grooves. There’s far too many plodders striving to be uber-boogie stompers (yuss, even slight set highlight Sucker Train Blues) – never going to be helped by Matt Sorum’s paint-drying drumming - that tonight’s airing of Guns’ classic It’s So Easy sends scurrying to the bogs at the merest half-glance, waiting all too ready and willing like a Motley Crue groupie to have their heads unceremoniously flushed down the loo last used by The Macc Lads. Slash plays the same guitar solo on every song and even has a ludicrous Angus Young moment in the solo spotlight, utterly bereft of any of the soul or style he once oozed, even The Gunners’ Patience is like a parody of award show link-up when Bon Jovi or Aerosmith sadly couldn’t be there. That they keep people dazzled seems to suggest that, like their forefathers the Rolling Stones, there’s a huge generation gap that no crash course can fill. At the very least they’re out playing and they do fulfil the ultimate rock star fantasy (not THAT one) of making us mere public-lings wanna get out there and scratch that seven year itch. - Stu Gibson
Donovan’s Brain
- Stu Gibson
The Replacements – All
Over But The Shouting: An Oral History
The title, from their song Never Mind, the real inspiration for a little band in the next wave of US punk, a band similarly at odds with ensuing success and the poetic hearts beating under those aww shucks shrugs and laconic little boy smiles. You will, as they could have sung themselves, fall in love with this book. Stu Gibson
Out Of Control: The
Last Days Of The Clash As the very titular explanation doth say Mr Vince (nee Greg – that not being deemed rock’n’roll enough by the comintern) White was part of the infamous ensemble that Field Marshal Strummer struggled to assemble to live, or wring, out the last, limping lung-fuls of air from the fabled last gang in town . Detailing, if not illuminating with the force of an interrogators lamplight, the whole sorry debacle as they toured, recorded the chain-flush-on-a-frequently-heroic-career Cut The Crap and re-connected with the great British public on the ‘celebrated’ busking tour. Some may disdain the speech reproductions and say White bears a grudge on the back of his regulation motorcycle jacket but an undeniable honesty shines indelibly through this account of a fan’s wide-eyed excitement and innocence being crushed under the cynical wheels of the music machine, possibly demonstrating why those like the Clash commandant carve out careers by accepting and working within the confines. A great look through the greasy obfuscation in the rotting gutters from where Clash central conducted business - the mind games, machinations and multiple pile ups of carefully co-ordinated personality clashes conducted by Strummer and manager / McLaren-style Svengali Bernie Rhodes. As an insight into and look behind the scenes of this insidious industry of entertainment this is a must read - anyone that got, say, Ronnie Wood’s recent autobiography, should really have a read of this. Acolytes prepare for an unsurprising shock. - Stu Gibson
Hank Snow
Trashcan Darlings
- Jeff
P. Paul Fenech
- Stu Gibson
Confederacy of Horsepower
-Jeff
BluesMix
- Stu Gibson
Chas
Burnett Blues Band Apparently a big draw on the Costa del Sol, the Burnett blues band don’t burn so much as slightly singe. For ex-pats, tourists and those with tequila hangovers it may be all very well done but is far too polite, pleasant and clammed-up by convention to be truly expressive as you may be forgiven for thinking the blues should be. While being similar on the surface it contains little of the raw excitement and delinquent scuzz that makes those old white boy blue testifiers of the Bluesbreakers age still so alluring and so is the sort of thing you’d be pleased to stumble upon on holiday or as a pleasant surprise at some suburban backwater bar, but is too much of a cabaret background to an all-inclusive buffet aboard a cruise-ship to really cut it as it kinda could. - Stu Gibson
The Loyalties
-Jeff
Tokyo
Sex Destruction
-Sleaze
The Compulsions
-Jeff
Splatter Whore /Bowel Stew So, you don’t think you mix sleazy, drug-stabbing rock n’ roll with gutpile grindcore? Well, I got new for you, champ. St Louis’s own Splatter Whore have done exactly on this queasy split 7”. Imagine the needle-Nazi gutter-rawk of NYC’s Genocide (an influence on the fellas, most certainly) sped up to eyeball bleeding velocity, with the pile-of-rot from Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster on vocals. That’s what’s happening here. It will mess up your whole day and creep under your skin and make you itchy and half-panicked, and the cover (either side; one’s got shitting, the other a tub of intestines) will make you puke. I don’t even wanna know what’s on the Bowel Stew side. Splatter Whore are fucking awesome, though. -Sleaze
Miss 45
-Jeff
Marble Sheep
think the lead vocalist had a really great Rob Tyner-esque quality, the whole vibe just wasn't my cup of tea (mushroom-enhanced or otherwise). But to each his own, you know? P.S. Although she does occasionally partake, this Sleazegrinder writer does not endorse the use of illicit substances. So if you get busted for possession while listening to "Message From Oarfish," I cannot be held liable, got it? And yeah, okay, I do like rainbows. -Holly |
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Anti-Nowhere League
- Stu Gibson PS – then read Sascha’s Teen Sleaze on ‘em…
Cock
Sparrer
- Stu Gibson
Creature
With The Atom Brain
-Stu Gibson
Sylosis
Sylosis, though, (‘Shredding From Reading’ - like label-mates 1000 Hertz’ ‘From Fuckston, Fuckshire’ they have a handy little slogan), are melodic yet brutal thrash through and through, from the fantastic cover of a desecrated city to the classical segues between rousing passages of reflection that are then ran through again with a precision payload of such intricately intense riff-rapeture (with battlement-toppling bass-drum damage incorporated – that somehow manage to be mellifluous as well) it’s like a mini-gun salvo skating over the icy wastes while you’re stampeded by brutal marches of meticulous mercilessness that relent long enough for you to savour them before the next course assaults you like 100,000 SAS troopers. Managing to smelt many aspects of metal - black, to sweetly euro and death’s sprawling descents and creepy crescendos with the odd moment of hardcore emoting - into this twisting, turbulent maelstrom means it’s a darkly majestic epic, yet a hopeful one, that shouldn’t have an epitaph. Full of passion and articulate, it’s an enjoyable, energising forcefield of a listen that can focus your fear and fire your faint heart, rather than being some pointlessly technical mission without any conclusion to its complexities. A kick up the arse, rather than a finger up it, then, and as this is only their second mini-release, what a whole album could bring (rumours are a rather large label is waiting in the shadows) later this year could be transcendental. -Stu Gibson
Wednesday
13
- Stu Gibson
Deadline Franco-Brit punks take a slight breath on their cross-border punk patrol and crank out more pell-mell pop-ska-plastered pogo-projectiles with an entire gig from the last campaign to show you where they been. Too Late Tomorrow is classic attitude and adrenalin Deadline that mixes the demure with drama, We Are Not American a surface skimmer of ska and Smell The Coffee a street-punk slam-dunk judder-drunk punch while We’re Taking Over concludes the overall band-on-the-road-theme into Cock Sparrer gang-mantra territory. These new songs don’t match their Gettin’ Serious high point of a few years ago but the live gig is a frenetic example of a top-flight, in-yer-face-with-no-need-for-fists outfit on top form. The songs are fast, brash and brutal, and have the atmosphere and as-if-you-were-there missing from many a notable live tread, sorry, rendition. While the blurb may proclaim how it’s as live as can be, no fixes, audio or audience edits, it shows also how bloody good they are, or can be. But then that’s for you to find out, non? - Stu Gibson
K.K.
Rampage
- Stu Gibson
Dani Wilde
- Stu Gibson
Jeff Healey
- Stu Gibson
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Zero Le Creche
- Stu Gibson
Dave Cloud And The Gospel Of Power
- Stu Gibson
Hamell On Trial
- Stu Gibson I
Walk The Line
- Stu Gibson Legion Of Parasites
- Stu Gibson
Nat King Cole
The first album is with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, and is mainly sweet romantic ballads with the sort of lush strings that sound like they’re about to cause spring to bloom instantly from the most unlikely of places and should have your screen starlet (season to taste, if you will, sirs) blushing coyly (or is that the gin n’ coke – shhh this is the age of innocence we’re winding back to), but there’s a few ultra-swing finger-poppers I Just Found Out About Love and To The Ends Of The Earth for slick daddios to drag their dames ‘cross the dining room floor to, alongside the nigh country glide of Dreams Can Tell A Lie and stoic regret of I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out Of My Life. The second CD switches orchestral arrangements over to Gordon Jenkins and is possibly more unbelievably serene. There’s more silk-scarf scripts that write themselves sound-tracked by these strings throughout this eighteen track colossus of elegies and odes, with the odd bout of moroseness creeping in under the sweepingly majestic sunsets on Making Believe You’re Here, Don’t Blame Me and even Cherie, I Love You. Vocally he can be said to be a touch on the schmaltzy side, through the neutrality of his voice, compared say to Sinatra’s slyly cocksure pizzazz and Dean Martin’s slack-jawed slur but despite the rather too white picket fence aspects of the songs and post-war satisfaction / distraction (Small Towns Are Smile Towns!!), these being 1953 and 1958 respectively, there’s a place for these exquisitely crafted chunks of aural cocoa, where dreams come true, stars twinkle nightly, broken hearts are merely scraped off with a mere morning shave and wave to the paper-boy and your imagination can run riot from ruination to rancid sadism and right back to rancour, sorry, romance, while you sip whisky and chain smoke fags, especially when considering the almighty turd deluge of what is hailed as romantic these days. The lack of anger may be apathy or just trite readings but get into character and allow yourself the occasional slip into the armoury of feelgood finery. - Stu Gibson
Dan Baird And Homemade Sin
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Dutch
rockabilly legends Batmobile are here found knee, or duck-tail, deep in
the detritus of the infamous Klub Foot, birthplace of psychobilly and as
hallowed, and possibly more horrible, than The Marquee and
Cavern in the Sixties, or Roxy and CBGB’s for punk. You
get the picture. Anyway, in case you weren’t there – needless to say
neither was I but these so-called ‘writers’ always do that don’t they,
just reading it off the fucking press sheets, irritates me no end that,
anyways, I proceed - the Klub has spawned legends from legends and the
current third or fourteenth wave of psychobillies probably know more about
it than the bands and punters of the day. Suffice to say every psycho and
neo-rockabilly band of as many different calibres as quiffs (Meteors,
Coffin Nails, Caravans, Demented Are Go, Guana
Batz, Long Tall Texans etc, Hellcaughtya) along with a few
garage gorgonzoiders like The Cannibals and Billy Childish
in some form or other all crawled through the cess-pit, charted on various
Stomping At The Klub Foot CD and DVD compilations. Depending on
where you stand on live albums this is of the better, lesser spotted
variety, in that it’s live as it landed, no edits, fret-lifts or
re-envisions of vocal vainglories, it’s as raw as untalc-ed rubber after a
frenzied fetish fuckstorm but all the better for it. There’s a knife-edge
and this teeters on it, heedlessly slicing tattoo’s into it’s heels, the
ink substituted by the swill from the stage floor as they stampede and
stagger through a roughneck rockabilly race-course from the slinkily-titled
Slapping Suspenders, theme song Bat Attack, King Kurt-a-romp-a-long
Bambooland and Ballroom Blitz, jarring into tyre-walls and
blitzing white lines feverishly. Despite the horror theme name and
tracks like Transylvanian Express and Zombie Riot don’t go
expecting anything like the current children of the psycho corn husk slice
n’ dicers. The bargain basement nectar blur and straight-forward savagery
of even the most good-time hood-down humper (Racing With The Sun,
Ain’t Gonna Drink No More) along with more subdued guitar
histrionics than Brian Setzer or Restless’ Mark Harman
lend them a psycho edge but this is a well-preserved specimen from the
neo-rocker / psycho archive caught live in it’s natural habitat, however
nauseating and unnatural that may actually have been. 
Hailing
from the Voodoo-meister Beat-Man’s homeland, these Swiss R’n’B brigands
are dead-cert compadres to the big, bad-ass boss-man in once more showing
there ain’t nuthin’ neutral about these slack-jawed, wrist-snapping,
ankle-grinding germs that pollinate your pretty gurl’s panties and fill
your own with ants that melt into amphetamine suppositories, mining
exquisite Chelsea-boot shaped canyons in yer decomposing dainties. So what
do you really get?…Well, shirt-seam splitting space truckin’
delta-draining incredible hulks of R’n’B of an increasingly edible
soul-food variety that’ll make your bowels bleed in some beatific
breakdown as they, politely as possible under the circumstances, decline
to be digested, causing a gravity gyratin’ farrago slipping through your
gut-streams. Ayuss, it’s dirty, draining and sweat stings with every
spine-tangling groping G chord and slithering E, but it’s a rare glory
making you groan here, indeed and inside, Johny n’ Jenny.
Does it make me any less of a man if I admit to you right
here, right now that this album almost made me cry? Well, it did, and I’m
not even drunk. But fuck you if you think it does make me less of a man
because I actually think it takes a real man to love sleaze metal so much
that when he hears some so glorious and brilliant that he feels it in his
goddamn soul, Jack. And I also think that if you ask Chuck Berry to lead
an all-star Swedish rock n’ roll cast in jamming on a medley of your
favorite Guns N’ Roses, Quireboys, and Faster Pussycat songs you’d come
close to breaking down and crying too. I can say without hesitation or dry
cheeks that I’ve found my summer album in Swingin’ at the Fences,
and “
In
heroically haphazard fashion Swiss sizzler’billies The Peacocks ain’t
pillocks and this collection of tastily unsavoury leftovers is as
essential as their last album of punk-pricked rockin’ – Touch And Go
– no doggy-bag fumbled self-consciously out of the recording studio
rest-room for these seven sweet-soled gear-stick shift-a-longs. Straddling
the fine and somewhat slippery line between sawn-off psycho-punkery and
skate-skedaddling shout-along commerciality with customary style and grace
this tip-top trio never descend into dreary dead-end’s where many a
punk’n’roll combo collect dust and panhandle for ten-a-penny rustbucket
riffs. Even when they could be accused of being derivatively punk’n’roll,
like on Half Mast Flags and Happened Before, their welcome
way with a unique lyrical slant and bouncing-bomb beat turns it on a
half-pipe into anything but a detriment and along with the polar opposite
double celebrations of C’mon Everybody (a titular and thrashtastic
tribute to his good lady in the style of long erstwhile Eddie Cochran)
and Drink Alone (self-explanatory but still exalting ode to the
old ally, alcohol) these suckerpunch the suspension in every kustom
culture car-jockey’s chassis as they’re sent soaring off-road. They really
come to the fore though on the Johnny Thunders rides the trail
cowpunk deluxe of I’d Rather Be Alone and I Am Not Gonna Tell
You with it’s feline-like expertise of fending off his female’s
questions following a night out. Deceptively simple and a damned pertinent
pointer that not every, or many, band(s) could unleash a set of off-cuts
of this calibre, Gimme More acts as more of a pace-maker for the
next album than a companion piece to their last. 
Like
the scarred remnants of a post-suburban meltdown, these Norwegian
stark-rock surveyors scavenge the aural wastelands and icy expanses of the
millennial malaise, bringing a gargantuan grandeur and cinematic splendour
to what in less theatrical hands could so easily be further exercises in
ennui to rival Skunk Anansie or even No Doubt. As it is AA
prowl stages constructed from Manic Street Peartrees elegies
coerced over the top by the tectonic plate shifting elements of Muse’s
bellicose bombast, Smashing Pumpkins stranded mayday messages from
Mellon Collie are given stern stares and several yards of short
shrift by Siouxsie, and manage to propel the parts into an earthily
ethereal, if slightly soporific, sci-fi fantasia. Melding liquid lullabies
with stiletto guitar licks, tantrums with torments from other planes,
iceberg crushing slabs of titanium tilting detuned metalcades are at the
vanguard protecting their precious cargo of swooping, swooning, orchestral
choruses on sniper-eyed crack-shots Master Of Disguise, Pin You
All and homeland hit Bundy. There’s a militaristic mania to
these riff orgies, a totalitarian atmosphere to the schizophrenic
stampede, though it doesn’t succeed in being seductively oppressive, a
sitrep not helped by the overly redundant rapped parts on
Fire!Fire!Fire! and Tricky Threesome. From sweetly svelte to
starved-of-oxygen cat-scratch vocals, sultrily wicked witch purr to
callously controlled paroxysms, perhaps it’s the accent but Agnete’s voice
can’t help bring to mind Nina Perssons’ dark doppelganger
discussing the finer points of sadism with Bjork and Muse’s Matt
Bellamy, which curiously conjures Cerys Matthews as a breathy
by-product. It’s different and highly dramatic but as so often it’s too
much screaming into space, and uninvolving for something with the
potential to really evolve into a stratospheric and state-shifting entity.
Following the death of Rock’n’Roll as the original crowd flew the coop on
crests of police hounding, planes a-crashing, minor-molesting,
cousin-squiring, church-finding and Colonel parking his arse on your
pretty face followed by mirthful marauding mop-toppers and sultry Stones
been flung at their sorry arses, the truly talented, willing and able
merely returned to what they did best. Yuss, music, but the music what
brung them, as they say, plus a fair bit of rebel-rousing and carousing,
of course, along the many winding ways, especially in the case of Jerry
Lee and this ‘un ‘ere, Mr. Gene Vincent. While both returned more than
ready for the country that they were raised on, and continued to raise
Cain with, Lewis meandered down an increasingly maudlin honky-tonk route,
brilliant and battering seven holy bales of hell’s own shit out of his
more famous and acclaimed Sun stuff that it did, Vincent went all
cosmic America on our unsuspecting, and alas, unlistening, behinds,
arguably before, or at least contemporaneous of, Gram Parsons,
though at this stage what with Gene’s alcohol intake, more chronically
consumptive than cosmic but anyway this makes these all the more sorry
sounds for sore ears and hollow hearts. Originally released in ’70 and ’71
on the Kama Sutra label (as If Only You Could See Me Today
and The Day The World Turned Blue) that had The Lovin’ Spoonful
but also the Flamin’ Groovies, here is the old bad-ass
be-bop-maestro in fine, if affectingly fragile but as attitude-addled as
ever voice, backed by members of The Sir Douglas Quintet kicking up
some Cajun-coked psychedelically woozy country-funk, not least the nigh-on
ten minute stand-out but not stand alone swirl of Slow Times Comin’
that’s as resplendently loose as any L.A. Woman flung down Vincent
avenue, and laced with the calming calamity-stoking chaotic city-born
country boy strains of Creedence chopping moves with Elvis’
fabled soul-stacked Memphis sessions of the late sixties while Glen
Campbell pops in to duet on his way to Phoenix, these two final
furlongs from Gene are astonishing artefacts, Americana or otherwise, and
shouldn’t be left languishing in some crypt of kitsch crooning. No cheap
reissuing of a washed up old roustabout this is pure Sweet Gene Vincent to
savour. 
Full Breach is back at it, this time re-issuing a split consisting of two
rare 12” EPs – Criminals (1983) and Tits and Champagne
(1989), natch – from The Joneses’ audacious catalogue for anyone clamoring
for empirically trashy, foolhardy and nasty, 50s inspired jangle and jive.
And really, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be. This split serves as a
nice complement to Keeping Up With…, offering a delicious
sandwiched sound sampling of Joneses material over the years, complete
with lyrics and liner notes from Jeff Drake and Greg Kuehn. Of course,
what it really offers is rock n’ inspiration for every penniless, drunk,
broken-hearted outlaw soul, and baby, that’s me. It’s probably you too.
Anchored and steered by Fields of the Nephilim mainman (he actually
WAS The Nephilim) Tony Pettitt but also in thrall to the hats n’
hooded eyes of old, N.F.D. are still relatively freshly fallen from the
Nephilim firmament. Getting past the patent copyist accusations, for
comparisons are obvious especially with Peter White’s karaoke
Carl McCoy vocals, the whole journey has been indomitably steered by
Pettitt into an inimitable brand, so ‘tis almost of no consequence who
dons the hallowed hat, kinda like a goth Skynyrd. This third album
shelters six new songs with a couple of remixes and a slew of vids and
continues the industrialized pick n’ mix from the final two McCoy
era albums The Nephilim and Elyzium - nothing wrong with
that, fantastical albums that they are, but in embracing a more human,
less aloof, form (would McCoy regale you with tales about ‘the depths of
my despair’?), they undoubtedly lose certain elements of their magnetism.
Headed
up by label boss Ron Sanchez, Donovan’s Brain are a kind of house band for
the label, made up of Career compadres as they careen past on their way to
and from their own various projects (this very record features Radio
Birdman’s legendary flying ace Deniz Tek). Named after the old
sci-fi book and film that Roky Erickson famously and fabulously
flobbles on about on the old April Fool’s radio phone-in, rather than the
sixties folk-goblin (I hope, anyway!) they’re a multi-headed animal of
psychedelia that nimbly manages not to get caught out by the dread term
‘collective’, where sprawling morasses of members makes the resultant soup
so cosmic it could be charted by sixth-grade kids on their first school
trip. Not content to sit astride astral clichés and wallow in inner space
on cruise control there’s elements of Pink Floyd’s finest shimmers
from Syd Barrett dawns to Wish You Were Here’s imposing
majesty, leaving the space between those eternally standing stones as
cryogenically frozen museum pieces, also west coast radicals like
Country Joe, and San Fransisco’s more sultry and disaffected denizens,
as songs ebb and flow, pulsating prettily, spiralling absorbingly and
generally taking garage-psych on a splendorous space-boogie carousel on
comet-crushers like Neuro Psych Trail Head (giving slight new
meaning to the Stones’ Let’s Spend The Night Together as a
sort of Let’s Share A Starburst Together), My Little Town and
All Fall Down, stopping for photo opportunities amidst The Known
Sea and Lennon-skied Cloud Maker. While reflecting the
landscape of their Montana base (I imagine), the desolate, alien terrain
being tentatively explored like a deep-sea submersible for a Discovery
documentary, there’s a welcome lack of winsome west-coast sixties idealism
being held onto. Though at times it may meander away with your gravity too
often for comfort or be too phase-heavy this welding of the way-out with
the every day every which way shows Sanchez as one switched-on
forward-thinking pilot of a plane not on any formally recognised flight
path. 
Legendary country crooner and be-sequin suited showman Mr.
Snow created an archetypal hybrid of backwoods hillbilly and rural blues
that bridged the years between Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.
Famed for more than being a certain Elvis’ first manager (a loverly,
slowly stoical pipe-smoking, whisky sippin’ reflective version of (Now
And Then There’s) A Fool Such As I is among these 26 tracks of
trouble, toil and trials) he drafted classics like I’m Movin On,
I Wonder Where You Are Tonight – later adopted by Jerry Lee -
and I’ve Been Everywhere (that Johnny Cash covered, but
inexplicably not included here) into the canon. With just lap-steel and
occasional violin and bass-fiddle for company, he two-stepped, waltzed and
sometimes yodelled his woes away. More than just a cowboy, lonesome on the
trail with beans, blues and rotgut booze, it’s not all tears in yer beers
slurped in dingy saloons of clichés though. There’s toe-tapping hoe-down
hoppers like Unwanted Sign Upon Your Heart and Music Makin’ Mama
From Memphis propping up the shoulders-slooped maudlin indulgences of
With This Ring I Do Wed, The Blind Boy’s Dog and Marriage
Vow and, befitting his Singing Ranger moniker, western-swinging
cowboy laments like We Met In The Hills Of Old Wyoming and My
San Antonio Mama to downright, goddamned jollys like The
Hawaiian Cowboy. 
Real Fucking Make-Up!
With customary cantankerous charm and slender mercy, Fenech,
The Meteors’ main force of malevolence, returns to the fray he
created to slug his seventh solo release right between your bloodshot n’
black eyes. Whatever can be said about the same old same old there’s no
questioning the guys productivity and his solo albums generally take
detours away from the ‘pure psychobilly’ he proselytises / prattles on
about. In tradition there’s a Duane Eddy twangathon to open with
before you’re accosted by samples from the spectrum of PPF’s underworld
arsenal from the purer rockabilly of Gene Vincent on Nick And
The Preacher, the gentle but sinister full moon cruise of That’s
Mean Of You Baby where the heartless bastard with the blues croons
from his cell, the playful lust of the Sun-drenched So Gaddamned
Hot, ghostridin’ in the sky on the jiggery-Pogue-eries
A Bastards Advice, Damned Happy and banjo-broadsiding
version of Ring Of Fire, where What Kind Of Spell You Use
(To Hold My Demon Heart) and I’m So Bad skewer the psychobilly
palette with a tent peg, which also runs the usual gamut of fuck you rants
and establishes, just for new listeners or for those whose ears have
become blocked by years of hairspray abuse and memory capabilities mashed
by snakebite n’ spesh swilling, his cock-of-the-walk credentials along
with This Fuckin World (Ain’t Big Enuf). Perhaps not as vicious as
his previous output but certainly more interesting, and a fine sparring
rival to his last solo slasher, The ‘F’ Word. 
Alas,
this is the sort of muso hush-puppy trust-fund funky blues that I can’t
abide so much I can’t even abhor it. Too much jam session cerebral
scale-celebrating inbetween discussing next terms humanities seminars and
so superficially slick I can’t even imagine Patrick Bateman from
American Psycho playing it before slitting some unsuspecting suckers
throat with a Phil Collins CD. More coffee-table than even
coffee-bar, far more accomplished than artistic, this London-lounging lot
tread more than enough water to replenish the driest levee and turn the
(middle of the) grittiest road into a smoothly-tamac-ed driveway leading
to a secluded stock-brokers mansion. Fine, I guess, if you want something
to play whilst sipping your fair-trade organic mid-afternoon Mocha while
nibbling carrot cake and waiting for your secretary to bring your suit
back from the dry-cleaners, or if you want to give old clapped-out Eric
extra kudos. 
It
just occurred to me that the best way to describe London’s The Loyalties
is to say that Pepsi Sheen would likely champion ‘em and Stu Gibson likely
drinks with ‘em. Featuring ex-members of the Yo-Yo’s, The Black Halos, and
Deadline, The Loyalties are every bit Tyla, Sudden, Kusworth, Keef, Izzy,
Buttz, and all the rest, and play the kind of genuine bar room blues n’
soul that’s as devastatingly catchy as it is desolately punk, like an
honest mix of The Hangmen, The Saviors, and the Dead Boys. So put a
feather in yer cap, chap, and loosen the bolero because tonight the
stories are as thick as the cigarette smoke and you don’t want to miss
that one magical, fleeting moment that could change everything forever.
Miss 45 is of hipster Swedish decent, which means they’re more Hives than
Hardcore Superstar, but still manage to keep things sleazy enough with a
swank garage pop sound that falls somewhere between the Sonic Rendezvous
Band and The Jacobites, and lyrical references to Hanoi Rocks, the New
York Dolls, and The Ramones. Steals the Show is one of those rare
birds that’ll tickle the rockers and the dancers, and sometimes
it’s nice to know that there’s something for everyone in a rock n’ roll
album, no matter what side of the schoolyard you’re standing on.
Back in
the receding mists of the punk rock fog, when the whole Oi! lark stampeded
from football terraces to the music venues and streets and elsewhere
picture postcard punk bands in tartan and Mohawks puked punk into one
corner while anarcho-crusties squatted in the others, there came, like the
dysfucktional coarse horse-fiends of the disgusto awopbopacalypso, The
Anti-Nowhere League, valiantly bridging some sort of gap between
Motorhead and Rose Tattoo and mid to late eighties grebos like
Crazyhead and the old Mother Love Zode himself
(unfortunately, or fortunately, as by this time they’d manage to snort
themselves into burnt-out alternate universe of brash banality where they
became, at the roll of a note, Thompson Twins, Big Country
or Spear Of Destiny). They probably weren’t aware of it, lesserly
gave a fart, but they sort of did. Anyway, clad in biker garb that
mirrored the weary early eighties fear of the button being pushed to the
extent we’d all end up in a radioactive Mad Max that was either
heroically cool or horrifically camp they certainly knew how to push
buttons of the powers that cower as well as the frazzled fraternities with
squalid speed and special brew engine-revvers like We’re The League, I
Hate…People, Let’s Break The Law and the ever ultimate fuck you of
So What. Classics to a curly ‘tashe hair, they effortlessly mirrored
their times with World War 3 and Woman alongside the
anti-army ode For You, lately covered by The Kings O Nuthin’,
and Out On The Wasteland, bullet-proof biker chest-beaters each ‘n’
all. With honest and humorous sleeve slop from mainman Animal, who
amiably allows the comically execrable kak like Queen And Country,
On The Waterfront and Johannesburg an airing, before it’s
battered by early demos and the second disc of convoy-carnage that has
near equals to the earlier anthems, as Get Ready riddles We Will
Survive and Pig Iron and Fucked Up And Wasted haul-ass
heedlessly down the trail of ‘the world’s fucked let’s get twatted, YES!’
moral to this scurvy-arsed story, this is as essential an overview as
you’re gonna get of ver League at this stage. Peaks and troughs between
bilious brilliance and howling hilarity this road trip will tip you out of
your stumbling doldrums and is well worth tackling. Just keep an eye open
for half-dressed highwaymen with sharp eyes.
Despite
their long run this is the first album in a little over ten years for this
hugely influential bruise-crew, who toughened up the London R’n’B of
The Who and The Faces a fair while before those Pistols did,
inventing terrace-terrorising thug-punk and street-punk along the way. An’
you know what? They’re still tensing those rhythms and beating down those
blues with a spirit that can sweep the most sceptical up on the everyman
waves of wisdom. Eternal themes of believing in, and standing up for,
yourself are chased down with beery-eyed bonhomie and nostalgia, albeit
couched in grins and grimaces (Did You Have A Nice Life Without Me?
A jaunty little look back at a lass left behind for the band), glorifying
their past, present, roots and riots as ever, while making some sort of
sense and perspective of it all (Spirit Of ’76 followed by state of
the streets address on So Many Things). The Oi, street-punk smarts
and closing-time shout-a-long stand-outs like True To Yourself and
Despite All This have had a surprising shelf-life since their
start-up in ’74, but it’s more than rose-tinted aggro as the charm and
conviction with which the sentiment is delivered is hard to deny as is the
strident force of the sound. 
Lest ye
get all excited this particular creature isn’t Roky Erickson’s new
project but Millionaire and Mark Lanegan (who takes
occasional ghoulish communion herein) keyboardist, Aldo Struyf. Neither is
it a barndance through the ebulliently lysergic fripperies of hippiedom
but a swirling swamp of desert-strewn psych-blues drones, like snub-nosed
stomp 16 Inch Revolver and Black Out, New Hit that strut
around cocked and loaded with dry, cactus-quivering guitars while keyboard
frequencies threaten to auto-fire the gun, and waves of slurred vocals sit
hunched over the slouched, insouciant arrangements that shrug at such
strictures as structures like the Mary Chain’s most obstinate noise
grind-downs, such as Rapeman’s Scalp – a bewildering and
excoriating ascent into ecstasy and terror - even Syd Barrett’s
solo stuff, as on Blackened Roses, Same Ol’ Doses, albeit about to
go through a scrap-metal pulverizer made from old Spacemen 3
bootlegs. Each track seems to surf on more of a rolling, resonating and
relentless riff till they gel into more of a groove thang, baby, gyrating
gargantuan fault lines that seem to fracture into different songs on each
listen, literally from hints of Julian Cope to Big Black on
Park My Car Outside The Records Store the next time, presumably
while awaiting the spacecraft to inspect their new landing strips. Far
more than the initial response to pass it off as Jon Spencer
dirt-bike riding with QOTSA in and around Amsterdam’s coffee-shop
districts, this is a subtle, initially subdued buzz that will baffle and
bathe you in healing nightmares, and may just cause evolutionary designs
of erratic efficiency in the future. 
Ready to
dismiss this clown and Murderdolls main-massachrist as another Sir
Scowlalot providing tirades for adult-escents to have tantrums in their
parents presence to, this set of bones is a nicely sutured surprise, not
the sub-Marilyn Manson manufactured malice for the fractured
masses, despite the initial scan through the track-list spearing your eye
with Not Another Teenage Anthem. ‘Tis indeed something of a
closet-collapsing round your head barricade of skin-flaying glam-metal
that’d bring any doll to life, and since Kiss, Alice and
W.A.S.P. and before, ain’t that what it’s all about? Third album in,
and with personal issues scarring the process, it holds true to the pain
making great art, well, better art than the previous weaker attempts to
escape. This time he ain’t turning round while running, or opening doors
while talking to his friend nor running away down the cellar steps.
Guitars are severe and set to sever and splice not stun, with shrieking,
ghostly sustain providing viscous fluidity atop the Frankenstein drum
barrage. Scream Baby Scream, thankfully not a Lords cover,
and All American Massacre rattle around in a casket full of old
revved-up Crue riffs, From Here To The Hearse and Put
Your Death Mask On cleaves and chugs their way through your while
My Demise is an authentic lament from a disembodied cowboy playing out
a Ziggy Stardust role, if ever there was one. Anyway, it’s a
reanimating change from the eternal haul of horror-billy and a whole heart
and lung subsuming death dance that you can do better than you thought. Or
should that be does you better than you knew? 
Free-form
experimentalism that causes dementia to jump, jive n’ jitter its bug-eyed
way through your brain, leaving jis spores in the dark scabs to cause
deviant jazz to splutter forth at random bouts of the future, meanwhile
your appendix finally finds something useful to do in blissful panic
besides exploding at inopportune moments, something these
hormone-overloaded kidney-corrupting chimps could cause much of your
presumably a’ready infested intestines to do like a colostomy-coruscating
chain reaction. Short, serrated stabs of discordant funk rhythms that not
even Flynn could fuck to, vocals / shrieks twitching between crank n’
ketamine and shark-tooth blackout guitars bite with no blanket to hide
under, never mind any anaesthetic for us pitiful cunts, just get out and
face it (with however much of your face is left after you’ve clawed at it
and smashed it against the nearest chin-crushing surface) while proffering
your knee-cap forward to strangers to pay for the plastic surgery
disaster) play The Birthday Party backwards with warped Krautrock
inbetween, while getting a pasting from an irate kick-boxer, the pain will
pass and you’ll reach some sort of plateau of perverse rapture. Not sure
your soul’ll be purified as such but something sure will pass. It’s no
surprise they play with Lightning Bolt, this chaos kinda succeeds
as while unstructured there’s a tapering meticulousness behind it. Insane,
though never inane, and more intriguing than infuriating. 
Question?
Will I go to Hell and endure a cattle prod to my scrotal salad for ever
after, ever more, if I say that this twaddle-fest from Brighton-based
blues-belle Wilde is merely Charlotte Church or Joss Stone
gone pop-poppette put to some blues templates? I fuckin’ hope so.
Similarly she sounds older than her years and surely as Keef likes a
drink, she can belt out the boogie as on opener Bring Your Loving Home
and desultory, sultry tunes like I Want Your Loving,
but, however authentic sounding the songs, which feature some splendicious
harp howling n’ scowling from brother Will, she sits tight in the blues
straitjacket and, alas, it doesn’t always ring quite right. The phrase
trying too hard does. All the strut n’ sass and slack innuendo of Come
Undone and trite feistiness of the title track pales besides I Love
You More Than I Hate Myself which suggests where her soul lies, along
with the pleasing Bonnie Raitt country-blues rag-time romp of
Slow Coach. It shall remain to be seen whether such a strong voice
another Maria McKee type maketh. 
With
what is now a tragic testimonial, Healey returns to the rollicking
bar-room boogie blues that he started his long journey with, after a while
jousting out jazz, and again runs rings around it with his super-sustained
but soul-swelling n’ smelting guitar playing on this set of live and
studio covers, standing ‘em drinks, crashing ‘em fags then splintering the
tables they sit at and wiping the floor with them. He certainly swings on
Jambalaya, shuffles Texas tails on the title, suits n’ boots Shake,
Rattle And Roll and smokes the skies charcoal on The Band’s
The Weight and Neil Young’s Like A Hurricane. It’s
amazing that he was just 41 when he died as he seems to have been here
forever to those of us of a certain age due to his part in Patrick
Swizzle’s Roadhouse film. If you gonna invest in some of our old
friend the blues this year, this is one mess that passes muster. 
Merely managing to claw their way through the cobwebs of the 1983’s tangle
of goth warblemeisters, ze Creche released a coupla singles and recorded
some demo’s then drifted off into the hinterlands trailing nowt behind
them but the bitterness inherent in the classic tale of singer leaving for
pots of gold just as all the A’n’R men in town where dropping their cocks
and about to unleash wads on the unsuspecting zeroes, and an epitaph from
rock scribbler Mick Mercer that they could have taken over from
Bauhaus while Pete Murphy went to the Far East to do a PhD in
pretension and Love and Rockets alternately lorded it and lingered
in L.A. Not so, despite the potential to pull on posterity’s heartstrings,
their main contribution to the fabled world of independent charts and
Chain With No Name stores - the title track here and follow-up single
Falling, seven songs in all - veers much more to the sort of
shadow-dancing sheen that The Psychedelic Furs were making more
nubile on Mirror Moves, even The Cure’s poppier appeal as
with The Walk live - bass-led 16th beats and shivers
through squalid suburbia, nowhere near as arty as the big B, though
effectively ethereal. Original, and best singer Andy Nkanza (nee, Manning,
now which one is more stupid, huh!), had the cheekbone husk you can count
change on and the affecting world weary disdainful descent of the Furs’
Richard Butler when he strives to straddle those scales (though not
the lyrics) and they have the odd sax-wisp (well, it was 1984!) and
spindly guitars basted with bullfrog flangers teasing the tassles on goth-girl
skirts. The rest, with new singer Jamie Lord, is the last legs being
lapped by failing commitment but remains an intriguing though largely
inert glimpse through billowing sweater sleeves lingering loosely over
bitten nails, flicking spider plant leaves in the face of failure. With an
appealing sound like the tape has been stored in a dusty attic for a few
centuries, anyone interested in the glories of taking one step and missing
the whole first rung on the ol’ ladder of success will find this a relic
worth rescuing. And this collection is the first step to that. 
From
the recesses railing against Nashville’s clean-cut niche clichés comes
Cloud and his troupe of ephemeral funkagagagaragerararacketeers with this
miasma of crumpled bong-boogie, scattershot psychedelia and exhaustive
garage-fumed cosmic ramalama and diawopbopalique. The lurching blues lick
of You Don’t Need Sex comes on like a broke-down pick-up truck
having its engine cranked by a pneumatic drill, yet still managing to pull
more than its weight in just a few bars. Casting himself as some
shamanistic master of ceremonies like a Sky Saxon, there’s definite
Westerberg moments, especially on the gloriously laconic Alex
Chilton power(failure) pop of Hopelessly Addicted To You,
scabrous humour at his good lady’s dress sense on Cosmetology and
shaky hand shuffles through pockets and drawers for lost senses on Try
Just A Little to Royal Trux on nonsensical noisescape whimsical
tune-up tear aparts like Rock Video and Lightning Surge, the
latter a lo-fi Spiritualized free-form space jazz jam, but one
taking place in an out of use crapper, one that is even more dilapidated
on the closing head-cleaving, eye-gouging gamut they tear gravely and
greatly through on The Bee Gees’ If I Can’t Have You. Makes
famously, and still fabulously, addled albums like Sticky Fingers
seem stiff n’ strait-laced, the gallop on a ray in an Atlantean aquarium
through Land Of A Thousand Dances would make old Sly Stone
scratch his head, and possibly grow a separate beard purely to pull on
pondering this record and make Dr. John question his source of
Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya as to why he was so callously short-changed.
Acoustic punk agitator and feral folk raconteur Ed Hamell marks his first
decade or so of casting aspersions and salty sideswipes at what’s
portrayed as all present and correct by the powers that pilfer with this
official live bootleg from last years Edinburgh Fringe festival. Rightly
so as the stage is where he excels, allowing his ad-libbed diatribes
licence to malice at will. Hailed as a Bill Hicks or Hunter S
Thompson set to music, he is so with the forceful ire of a
hallucinated Henry Rollins under the humour, but with the musical
chops and sceptical wrecking ball-like chips on his shoulders of fellow
New York resident Curtis Eller, making it more than just a ‘comedy’
skit. Satirical, a la Rich Hall’s Otis Lee Crenshaw
character, yet picaresquely biographical, here his straight off-the-cuff
anecdotes ad-libbed at 50-cal. rate are as accurate as the military claim
their laser-guided missiles are, but with collateral damage you’d do best
to sift through and savour. His withering disdain is warmed by his
Billy Connolly-like ability to find the humour in everything and
everyone, acutely amplifying the minutiae so it resonates the comedy
creaking in society’s shackles that bind us, as he catapults a cast of
characters at us from his motormouth and antique git-tar about road trips,
parents, the church, bad n’ bizarre jobs, acquaintances odd and old. You
get the drift, but really get that of this hugely honest, likeable and
necessary presence, sort of like a verbal tyre-shredder on the lawless,
anarchist side rather than the police’s. 
Comprising members of several old Finnish punk bands, this is no change of
direction into Americana territory, though it could well be as the
Scandinavians tend to excel in that as much as they do garage rock. In
this case it isn’t the choppy chords and cocky commercialism of The
Hives and so on but the swirling all hands lost to the seas that
touches on the Murder City Devils In Name And Blood with the
drunken, broken-knuckle keyboards soaring above the inkily melancholic but
murkily melodramatic melodies, that, like The ‘Devils, also captures the
collars-high, scuffed hands in pilots jacket stance and soul of Social
Distortion that so many miss out on though strive for. At the same
time their euro-pop sensibilities serve to give them an air of a hardcore
A-Ha on awetastic ailment lifting starting-block quartet Trouble
Seeker, Stigmatized, Black Wave itself and Demonic
Verses. And if it not so much sags in the middle a bit, but doesn’t
scale those northern lights until the six month sunset of slight twinkly
peaking epic Fire, Be My Guide and homeland hit single Monster,
then, so what, I care not, for this has set my sights through this squall
that spring sprung, so I salute them. Or sob, whichever. 
If
Eater were the token teens for the ’77 punk elite, then this
scruffy-arsed bunch may well have been that for the anarcho-squat scene
that developed around the early eighties, as Britain somehow got shittier
and the original punk scene gave way to the caricature Mohawk uniform
morons. Influenced by Crass, Black Flag, DK and the
like and supporting legends Conflict, Broken Bones and
The Subhumans this collection of their first demo and sole album (The
Prison Of Life) with a single and couple of compilation cuts splodged
inbetween is a soiled, scabby, glue-scarred n’ scathing little monster
spurred on with the fury of youth propelling the ropier moments through
the peeling paint and plaster spattering from the ceiling to a short
breath of fresh air amid the emphysema –miring mould. As with the bands
above, this is nothing other than heavily political, it’s far from pretty
or pleasant for those used to even the most odious of ‘street’ punk bands,
but it’s a stark slap in the face that at one time the underground really
did exist and was a threat - an idea that’s tragically all too quaint now.
As a chaotic cavalry charge of disorientating confusion and discord from
beneath the sewers it soundtracks stale bread and snakebite psychosis as
much as political and social disarray but is no worse for it on the
thrashier tumult like Blinding Light and Sea Of Desecration,
and, well, pretty much all of it, and still has insight and the power to
excite and incite, though maybe that’s masochism. 
So
you read this far and you’re scowling like Billy Idol thinking
‘huh?’ Hey, after a hard day of nuthin’ much at all ‘cept scuffling
through a huge mound of CD’s squawking to be reviewed and I’m on the wagon
so a thirst gotta be quenched somehow n’ you see, there’s been a whole
wailing wall of ol’ King Cole reissues warming the wine-dry tuning pegs of
my heartstrings of late. So, y’see, behind every rocker there’s a friar
fulminating with the keys to the hermitage, reclining from rigmarole’s
rigours with some smooth shades while rustling up another ruse.
Always renowned as a great live band, if not one of the best, it’s a shame
there’s no official live Georgia Satellites material out there.
This though, is Satellite leader and bar-room bard, here in his lair,
Baird’s second solo live album, recorded at acclaimed poke-hole JB’s
in Dudley, and is an absolute scorcher. Double disc, and with a DVD
apparently to follow, this is one treat to get your fingers stuck into,
and ears wet to, and vice versa I well imagine. Still in great scratch -
voice style - gap-toothed, Tele-totin’, goofy and as generously granted
with the glory