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Demos - May, 2005 __________________________________________________ |
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Black Hill |
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Bob Leather Presents: Filth
Then it goes back to the creepy shit. But for a minute there, it was almost like El Duce joined a teenage punk n’ roll band and really rocked out with his cock out. Another couple ass kicking tracks like that, and Bob might even score one of those teenage bitches he loves so much. __________________________________________________ |
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Elvis DeLuxe
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Goodfinger
Ah, but will it click with the hip kids? I dunno, ask a hip kid, I’m just a rock n’ roll burnout looking for kicks. __________________________________________________ |
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On Parole
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Psycho Critters
*I didn’t actually hear that, but it would be pretty cool, right? ___________________________________________________
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-Sleazegrinder |
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Shamelessly retro, spandex abusing,
horns-throwing flash metal from Italy. I do believe I have written
those exact words before, but never with so much conviction. Our hairspray
heroes in Black Hill are so dedicated to the fine art of wearing
sweatbands as everyday accessories and wrapping any pole they encounter in
scarves that they blow right by the major mascara massacres of the
glam-metal era, and draw phantom inspiration from bands they’ve never even heard
of, like Surgical Steel and August Redmoon and Black N’ Blue (before they
totally pussied out with that major label garbage). It’s that raw, raucous, sleazy early 80’s Sunset Strip
stuff, the teenage-kicks junk rock that was equal parts Sweet and
Kiss,
with just a dash of punk energy and street metal grit. Eventually, that
stuff died out and it was all high-pitch squeals (thanks, Vince and Ron)
and fuckin’ somersaults and lipstick and pop hooks, but in that trashy
twilight before Crue, GN’R, Ratt, and Poison
all went global, when glam metal was still
loud and weird and fulla disease, bands like Black Hill kept Saturday
night alive. They are kind of band that might light their legs on fire, if
somebody didn’t think of it first. This demo is a swell intro to their
Superspandex world, chock fulla hooks and whiz-bang confetti cannon guitars,
and even the silly powerpuff ballad sounds pretty lighter-raising. The
fellas didn’t include a song list here, but you could pretty much just
label ‘em “Song about a chick”, “Song about rock (with extended guitar
solo)”, “Another song about a chick”, and “A song about a chick, part 3”,
and that’d be close enough for rock n’ roll. Black Hill could certainly
benefit from bigger production next time around, but I suppose the same
could be said for all us. In the meantime, if you’re lookin’ for some
cheap, trashy kicks, then I doubt you’d find any cheaper or trashier than
these.
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Tommy
Krash is Philly’s most caustic glamstar, and probably it’s most
prolific, as well. On any given day he’s hustling in glitterpunk bands
like Sinn, Dead Star Factory, Gun Shy, and
American Sugar Bitch, and now this, a porn-driven, semi-acoustic
sickshow that could easily get our man tossed into a 30 day observation
ward. The songs on “Filth” are raw, stripped down, lo-fi fuck
rockers, most of ‘em just Krash and his guitar, and what sounds like the
exact microphone GG Allin vomited on every night during his
’91 tour. Fittingly, then, the songs are about Krash's dick, and the
places he likes to put it. Most of the time in girls, sometimes in buckets
of fried chicken. Most of the time, it’s too absurd to be threatening (
“Girl you got me going/You got me so I can’t sleep in my janitor’s
closet”), but it’s still impressively single-minded, and Krash never lets
up the on the psychotic-sex-offender act. It all comes to a…um…head on
track 5, “Are U Legal?” when Kra…I mean Bob Leather kicks
the nasty-ass flash metal into overdrive. As he drawls and whines about
some chick’s shaved pussy, the guitars start to ping-pong all over the
place, and suddenly this dimestore side-band piffle sounds like a
sex-crazed rock n’roll monster. Yikes. 
Polish
riff rockers here, which has gotta be a first. The last 666 bands I’ve
heard from Poland were all death metal, every one. Well, maybe one or two
black metal bands too, but it was all the blood and blast beasts and
thrashing til death. My friend Ian Christe, who wrote the book
Sound of the Beast, says that countries with harsh economic realities
are often the most receptive to extreme metal – apparently, they even have
death metal bands in like, Iran and Iraq – so I guess that explains it.
Also, they don’t seem to make porn in Poland either, so there’s more
pent-up aggression to deal with. And it’s pretty cold, too. However, I am
half Polish myself, so I just knew there had to be some rock in the
bones of the Poles, somewhere under the spikes and corpsepaint, and now,
finally, a little evidence. Elvis Deluxe are obviously influenced
by the more famed and fabled contemporary stoner rock bands – Fu,
Nebula, Kyuss – as well as their doper predecessors,
Cactus and Grand Funk. But since they are Polish and have no
porn, they play the shit like their hands are nailed right onto the
guitars, just painfully slamming into the songs until they submit and
smash into splinters. Some might say that this approach defeats the
purpose of drugbuzz rock n’roll completely, since ‘groove’ is the last
thing on your mind when a bunch of crazed Poles are trying to crack your
skull open with their relentlessly macho metal, but those people are just
fuckin’ pussies anyway. Dope smoking pussies, even. So dig, if you wanna
hear some savage stoner rock played by guys that were probably worshipping
Satan 3 months ago, this is the place to find it. I mean, good luck, since
they don’t appear to have a website or anything, but maybe you’ll get
lucky. 
Mike
Williams plays guitar in New York rockers Goodfinger. He used
to be in 90’s psychedelic narco-artmetal champs UnderNeath What,
which appears to hold a lot more cache around here than out there in the
cold and drizzly music ‘industry’, where nobody ever remembers nothin’,
unless it involved blood and money. Actually, UNW did have their
share of blood and money to spill, but that’s another issue altogether.
Anyway, besides a bitchin’-if-semi-obscure pedigree, Goodfinger have other
not-so-secret weapons up their collective sleeves, most notably frontfox
Scrappy Calloway, a real bloozy powerhouse of a hard rock singer with
a thousand yard stare. She sounds like Bellrays belter Lisa
Kekaula, minus a little Tina Turner, but with the twice the pop
appeal. Outtasight. The songs are big and loud and weird, part slinky rock
n’ roll cabaret, part heavy-devy blues-powered arena rattle, all of it
bright and buzzing. 4 tracks here- all of ‘em available to sample on their
website – that range from the full-throttle blooze-pop n’ roll of “Ball
and Chain” to the pomp-ed up “All in the Game”, which
Meatloaf coulda wrote, easy. 
Our
friends in Sweden's finest sleazeboogie hellhounds the Speedfreaks
are back (well, most of 'em) in a new, equally rough n' ready biker-punk
gang, On Parole. Mixing the fast, lean punk-metal of Motorhead
with the neo-psyche stoner rumble of the old Man's Ruin roster and
a healthy dose of the Stooges, On Parole are quintessential rock n'
roll motherfuckers. This is (obviously) their 2nd demo, and it's a
monster, with three blazing assbangers - "Barflies" (about
drinking), "Hard Rockin' Man" (about rocking), and "Drivin'"
(about driving home after drinking and rocking all night long), and all
three of 'em thrash n' roll like a shot-up dog wrapped in barbed wire.
Pure evil, man. 
If
you can imagine the thick, sprawling, whiteboy blues of the Black Keys
being beaten into bloody submission by a flash metallized bar band in
dirty denim with a howling banshee lead screamer up front, then you not
only have an imagination as wonderfully wild as mine, but you have also
envisioned the cluttered-but-cozy sound of Italian hard rock heroes the
Psycho Critters, on this underproduced-but-tryin’-hard demo. Vocalist
Anna Rella bellows like a pissed-off 80’s miniskirt rocker while
the band chugs and churns behind her in a wall of smoky gray noise, for
half a dozen short, semi-sweet tracks. It’s like a giant wheel of muddy
garage-blooze-punk-metal that lurches along, drunkenly, to the finish
line. Closer “Hot Leaf” is probably the most indicative of the
band’s aesthetic, featuring a riff that could be Cream just as much
as it could be Diamond Head (!), a lotta sexed-up yelping from
Anna, and wet, slam-athon drums threatening to rupture the song right in
two. It’s a gas. Problem is, half the fun of this one is squelched by the
woeful cardboard production. It could be no-fi on purpose, I suppose, but
I’m living in a strictly hi-fi world from now on - Sci-fi Hi-fi, if
I have to – so I’m gonna hold out for their next release before I decide
just how Psycho these Critters are. I hear it’s gonna be in
Quad.*