Sleazegrinder: Lanternjack

Lanternjack - Look Alive

"Now there's no turning back." - Way to Ride

You may already know, at this point, that of all the bands I rant about and grandstand for, Detroit's Lanternjack stand teetering on the top of the Super Rock heap, the renegade uber-heroes of it all. You can slash away at their volatile tempers, unstable behaviors, and self-destructive streak of wild abandon all you want, but that just sweetens the sin, doesn't it? Sure, they are dangerous, narcotic, and sleazy. Absolutely, they are sexual predators and anti-social criminals. But citizen, you've gotta believe me- that's exactly what rock and rollers are supposed to be. Thank Christ there's at least one band in this pitiful, post-Guns n' Roses world that's willing to dive right over the edge that most people are afraid to even peer down at.

No amount of onstage chaos and backstage mythmaking would matter one iota, of course, if Lanternjack couldn't live up to the long, black shadows they cast, so here's your fuckin' proof, a big, meaty, raging slab of it. "Look Alive" takes all the weighty promise of 2000's slash n' burner "Hussy" and amps it up to unspeakably lethal proportions. There really aren't any handy musical touchstones to compare Lanternjack's filth and fury with. No one else is quite as capable of making his guitar snarl like a werewolf as Luke Wood is, and even Axl and Iggy look like posers in light of the tiny terror with black holes for eyes that is Johnny fuckin' Flash. Let's just say that whatever you're listening to right now ain't got half the balls of this record.

Flash sings the way he does- vacillating wildly mid-song between a hissing rock star venom and a commanding, biker metal bellow- partly because he's as crazy as they come, and partly because he knows that he's got a job to do, and he knows he can do it better than anyone else. Even "Every single night", as he says in the in the amazing "Thighs", if he has to. I have seen him perform his self-eviscerating soul exorcism live and raw and real, and I can tell you for certain that he means everything he screams on "Look Alive". Every admission of atrocity, every sleazeball come-on, every yelp of panic, every desperate stab at midnight glory, it's all ripped straight from the pages of the very black book of Flash's life. The fact that he's got such a flamethrowing, death-defying, top shelf rock and roll band backing him up is his the only reason he ain't singing his songs from behind bars, or from the grave. This, brothers and sister, is no drill. This one's the real thing.

You want details? The aforementioned "Thighs" has the nastiest dive-bombing guitar riff I've ever heard, and it sticks with you for days afterwards, a lingering, soul shaking stab of pure evil. Wrapped around it is Flash's single-minded mission, punctuated by Bill's military drumbeat- "You know I really want to feel it now, I want to push it to the red", Johnny warns his hopeless prey, "And there ain't nothin' gonna stop me, from getting you in bed." Sure, you've heard such cock-walking boasts a million times before, but never with enough conviction to really convince you that this 85 lb, 5 foot ball of drunken heat lightning really is capable of all the destruction he plans on committing in the name of rock and fucking roll. This sense of feral fearlessness never lets up here, and even when Flash begrudgingly admits the occasional defeat, as in "Lucky Boy"- "I'm such a lucky boy, I got a bottle in my hand, and I'm walking out the door"- you just know he's got a fittingly vicious revenge scheme cooked up before he reaches the end of the block. Elsewhere, the perils of high contact rock and roll are spelled out in acid metal chugfests of slithering decadence like the Metallica-on-Dead Boys fight anthem "Warzone" ("Every bar is a warzone, baby, when they all want to see you killed"), the manic, liquor-fueled lust of "Pretty Hex", and the soaring slink of "Secret of the Night". Creepy-crawling closer "Dangerville Heights" even shamelessly drags out the inner Jim Morrison in Flash, and comes as close to a kind of post-apocalyptic power blues as the Lanternjack are gonna get. For now, anyway. Although the tempo and temperament vary from song to song, the intent, throughout, is the same. It's too bad that the term "Shock and Awe" was invented and exploited by the Man, because that's exactly what these cold-blooded rock and roll mercenaries do for 14 brutal, bloody tracks.

"Look Alive" sounds as big as it is. Tim Pak's thunderous production pushes everything so close to the red, as I'm sure the boys requested, that you just can't listen to it at a reasonable volume, because it simply won't let you. It commands your stereo just as forcibly as the band commands your attention when they're are falling to brittle pieces in front of you at whatever rock dive it is they're currently destroying. Many bands that build their reputation on the live experience crumple when they get to the studio. The Lanternjack, however, never crumple. "Look Alive" is surgically executed, louder than God, and, if you think you're some kind of rock and roller, it's an absolute necessity. It's also the only (relatively) safe way to experience the evil that these men do, so if you want experience all the excitement without a bottle to the skull or a some similarly ugly incident, then this'd be the way to go. But however you want to play it, just take flash's title track advice. "C'mon, baby, Look Alive". The wolves are most certainly calling you.