UA are a set of scabrous Scots who perform various classics and curtain raisers in the curt, clipped style of The Man In Black himself, yessir, Sir Johnny of Cash, in the Sun years. A whole slew of spruced-up smashes get steam-rolled and boom-chicka-boom-ed on this first full-length album. Morphing Billy Idols ‘White Wedding’ into a malevolent mutter under darkened horizons is inspired, as is mixing Cash’s ‘Ballad Of A Teenage Queen’ into ‘Teenage Kicks’. Pink Floyds ‘Wish You Were Here’ shows that all songs are Rockers at heart, surprisingly still retaining the imperiousness of the fragile original, while ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ has the hell-fired zeal of a Pentecostal preacher reciting sermons on stark icy dawns in a clapboard church in rural Wisconsin, or wherever.

While it is possible for all you cynics to pout and prattle on about pastiche and piss-take, Union Avenue do this serious. Alright, they’re having a cork-popping time and smiling slyly all the while but following some sort of unwritten Rockabilly tradition of adding a slap and tickle to well-known tunes (like The Polecats ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, Number 9’s ‘Hey Joe’, Dave Phillips ‘Tainted Love’ and The Big Six’s ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’) they go a toe-tapping step further and when they succeed, which is often, there’s a real believability that Mr Cash would have done these songs, somewhere someday, in some life or other.

‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ stumble slightly into the land of novelty yet that’s only a very minor nitpick, especially when you have a take on ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ that lifts it out of the back room blues bar behemoth of balding bankers flexing their fingers aimlessly, and accelerates it s greasy wheels westward ho. And the whole damn thing is wrapped up nice and neat as the proudest pompadoured ducktail with a live rendition of their essential version of Motorheads ‘Ace Of Spades’.

Apparently the new album will see them tackling Tarantino soundtracks and be titled thus – Union Avenue...Sing Quentin.

If that doesn’t confirm the genius of these mean eyed guys from the slate grey granite of the far North then your cause is as lost as theirs is just. __________________________________________________

- Stu Gibson