CD REVIEWS December, 2006.
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The Terminals
Forget About Never
Dead-Beat

Finally, Nebraska kicks in with their own gritty rock n’ roll adventure. The Terminals are a multi-gendered power trio who bang out thunderous garbage rock with a rollerderby organ and a sledgehammer guitar sound that’s like the Sonics hitting a wall at 110 MPH. The production (by In the Red mainman Andy Caffrey) is blown-out and lo-fi, the attitude is all bloody lips and razorblades, and there are few fruggable hits under the swells of dirty noise, particularly the raucous “Out of Place” and their Mummies-gone-mummier berserko take on the Castaways’ “Liar Liar”. Wild. You may never look at corn the same way again.
-Sleaze

The Sinisters
Terminal Volume
Fading Ways

Toronto-an cliché cruisers put years of ragged gory tales of reprobation and skipping probation no doubt into a crack pipe constructed from an acetylene torch and crunch crypts, ribs and rotgut bottle tops with one chipped tooth and two chords crusted with the condensed residue of a decades dirty dealings.

You could be sardonic and say you cannae go far wrong driving cross-country in a cranked up coupe with a couple of Motorhead records and a tattered tape of early Supersuckers as back up, but, as all the smart boys know full well or fuckin’ should do by now if you ease up on the clutch and be peering at your crutch too long you end up like a Crypt-label cast off playing for nickels with the New Wave Hookers. And if, like vocalist Saint, you siphon off skin-tight flagellators like ‘Mr. Disaster’ and the AC/DC hillbilly ruckus with Nashville Pussy of ‘Baby Where’d Ya’ Go?’ and ‘Violence and Lust’ in a manner that makes Duane Peters’ diaphragm sound dapper then mores the jalopy-junkin’ power to ya.
-Stu

The Farrell Bros.
Dead End Boys
Raucous

“Those were the good old days – we raised a lot of hell back then, Broken bottles and broken hearts – I raise a lot of drinks to them…” – ‘Old Glory’

Creating the kind of clatter that only battlescarred vets of knuckledusted back-street brawls and back window crawls can these cranked up Canadian cats filter the romance of Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’ through Johnny Thunders jugular, set-up a studio in a junkyard of Cadillacs and unleash this torrent of hard-luck ‘n’ hard-living tales from honky-tonk hell. Dirty fingers, rotten teeth, jackets as tough as sackcloth with the attitude and fervent drive of the most delinquent desperado’s in town The Farrells’ have feral classico malevolent hoodlum cool that’s ran ragged from ‘The Wild One’ to ‘The Outsiders’, combing hair higher than the collars covering their misunderstood hearts of gold, standing tough on their street corner terrain wooing the girls with a voice that exhales the stench of countless dying embers of nights scarred by temptation playing tricks that have turned into torment… a scrawny roll-up clenched between a rictus grin and a ride in his Dad’s car - as likely to clock ya with a padlock as kiss you and offer you the last tab in the pack, prowling the funfairs and promenades as on ‘R.E.B.E.L.’, ‘Wink’ and ‘Heisted Girl’, earnest lover on ‘Burning Desire’ with codes of honour and conduct as well-combed as mainman Shawn’s barnet on the inside sleeve on ‘Let’s Face It’ and ‘Dead End Boy’, and if the quadruple scotch as closing time choogle of ‘It’s Allright Tonight’ doesn’t get you out the door when it’s all fucked up n’ final then brother you need to change the wheels on your dreams. Through the sheer corrugated skull-crushing pitched battle these songs are as chiselled and crafted as Buddy Holly and everything that The Clash would dearly have loved to have been.
-Stu

Caltrop
Self-titled

Wow, man. Caltrop’s bio just blew my mind. “Caltrop is a collaborative writing experience that involves the interpretation of perspective without ascendancy”, says here. Yikes. No wonder you need guys like me, to decipher statements like that. What North Carolina’s Caltrop have to offer you, besides ascendancy, are four languorous stoner-doom tracks full of rolling-down-the-mountain mudriffs and a general sense of floating in a lake of tasty syrup. Possibly pancake. There’s little in the way of vox, giving 10 minute work-outs like….fuck, whatever the 10 minute song is called…enough room to grow legs and lumber around on it’s own, like a tree stump monster. Which may, at the end of the day, be the very definition of ascendancy. So I guess they were right all along. Heavy shit, brotha.
-Sleaze

Jerry Lee Lewis
Last Man Standing
Artists First

Where all-star collaborations are all too often cozy exercises on the cash-in couch of complacency, revolving doors of perfunctory performances with all the pent-up passion of a porn star whose libido was last seen lazing about the pool with a bellyful of linguine, it’s fittingly left to ol’ Jerry Lee to deliver a set of pairings that leave you breathless, legless and quite possibly dress-less. 

With a title tailor made for our favourite unrepentant reprobate like one of Lansky’s finest creations the Killer takes the bull by whatever balls it has left after confronting the nemesis named Lewis, destiny in both hands and dominates matters with his indomitable personality. Unlike other congratulatory meal-tickets and ego-enhancers the guests here aren’t doing their humble host a favour but vice versa, and you best believe it. On the supple sour-mashed form found on the sixties and seventies Mercury years records each choice of sparring partner is as inspired as the Ferriday fireball’s sprawling honky-tonkin’ tilt-a-whirlin’ deliriously dextrous twinklings. The guests may be largely incidental, overshadowed by Jerry Lee’s volcanic presence and the effortless ease at which he stomps his own boot-heels all over these well-worn flagstones on the road to ruinous redemption but Delaney Bramlett hotwires the tarmac tramping terrors on ‘Lost Highway’ with slide that could resurrect Duane Allman; not even the inexplicably included cretin Kid Rock can mar the magnificent anticipatory rush up a collapsing bordello stairwell of ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and, at 71 or so, Jimmy Page is told in no uncertain terms that, son, you ain’t ever Rock and Rolled. Ringo Starr is needlessly indulged on ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and Nashville salesman Toby Keith’s presence suggests some stellar PR back-scratching, while the surprisingly anaemic trot through ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ with fellow fire and brimstone boogiefier Little Richard seems to be a result of the expected electricity being cancelled out leading to a version more fitting at a polite luncheon debate, not the lustful goggle-eyed leering these impenitent reverends have indulged in oh too easily.

With this contrary cat it’s way too early to talk of last wills and testaments but if this should unfortunately prove to be, then we should hope it’s the first of many, for this is fabulous, with more lithe limbed life than many of the airbrushed and streamlined marketing projects that are passed off as artistes on our eagerly aware selves. Real, rancorous and regal this last man standing is a congregation of one that will not be seated. 
-Stu

Pretenders
Pretenders / Pretenders II
Sire/Real/Rhino

In our remit-less realm of repackaging this pair of post-punk classics more than deserve the nice ‘n’ neat two-disc reinvestment treatment that Rhino have lavished on them. While Chrissie Hynde famously flounced on the peripheries of the London punk explosion enviously eyeing the deals going down she could hardly have imagined that upon landing a line-up as formidable as the original Pretenders that she’d barely see three years with them before the ever present tragedy of wasted talent tangled things up. So it’s fitting as snug as the tight leather-look pants she strutted about in on those old Top of the Pops clips that their scant legacy has been expanded upon. Hynde’s distinctive and woefully undervalued vocals – a soft, sensuous purr tempting you into a caustic tom-boy stray cat scratch and spit - sit splendidly atop the majestic guitars of James Honeyman Scott, Pete Farndon’s bass as dapper as his hair and combined with the almost incontinently inventive rhythms of drummer Martin Chambers create a vibrant versatile whole that may cause anyone who’s only heard a singles collection to plummet down a tunnel of musical re-evaluation. (Not least after comparing ‘Mystery Achievement’ to a certain revered Manchester bands ‘I Am The Resurrection). Hynde’s stampede-at-any-second-this-girl-ain’t-for-trampling-stood-more-ground-than-the-bison-grazed tough persona pushes fiercely to the fore on album tracks like the powder drill of ‘Precious’ – which, incidentally, contains the best expletive in recorded history – or the rockabilly ricochets ‘Tattooed Love Boys’ and ‘Bad Boys Get Spanked’ (also contender for best use of ‘Hurrh’, yeah, watch out Waxl and Stiv and didn’t Tyla squelch ‘Kiss This Joint’ right down to the ‘c’mere’ lunge?) but its when paired up with her tender wisdom and compassion, as on ‘Lovers Of Today’, ‘Message Of Love’ and the gorgeous couplet of ‘Birds of Paradise’ and the Ray Davies penned ‘I Go To Sleep’ that their appeal becomes as real as the fabulously direct Hynde herself (shown humorously in the scathing ripostes at the end of ‘Pack It Up’). 

Judged solely on the original sets it’s possible to put these on a podium together. However, unless you’re sorely needing to replace a bootleg of a promo-only live disc then as reissues go ‘Pretenders’ would nudge the for the B-sides and demos.
-Stu

Kris Dollimore
02-01-1978
Sun Pier

So who is Kris Dollimore, and what was he doing on February 1^st, 1978? The first question I have an answer for. The second is really none of our business. Kris is a British bluesman, at least these days. In his previous incarnation, he was the axeman for surly, suit-wearing hardmen The Godfathers. The older, presumably wiser Dollimore leaves the crunching rock anthems behind here for a charming and surprisingly authentic collection of clean delta-blues, recorded live with just a drummer (Wolf Howard) to keep him from getting too lonely. Highlights are many, and they include the dreamy ghostwalking closer “East of England”, the fiery, stomping “Brother Ray”, and the harmonica-driven gravel-fest “The North Kent Post Industrial Hillstomp Blues”. 02/01/1978 is like nothing you’d expect from a man who’s played with everyone from Adam Ant to Stiv Bators to Del Amitri and the Damned, but something tells you might be hearing the real Dollimore here, perhaps for the first time. Excellent stuff.
-Sleaze

Underride
Insanity Land
Underride.net

Latest EP from Seattle’s grungedelic volume dealers Underride. Five tracks on deck, ranging in sonics and tone from the crashing, smashing 80’s-fried flash of opener “Telephone” to the pure, raw venom of headbanging southern riff n’ roller “Violate Night”. As always, Rev’s vocals are top-notch – the motherfucker has one of the strongest arena-baiting voices in rock n’ roll, period – and his band backs ‘em up like paid assassins. Ok, so they veer off into proggy Queensryche territory in places here, particularly on the oddball “Save Me From Myself”, but they are, after all, from Seattle. That shit is in the water up there. Side-stepping the Tate-isms, it’s yet more damning evidence that Underride are one of the most underrated bands in the country. Even up the odds and snatch this bruiser up.
-Sleaze

Butchering The Beatles: A Headbashing Tribute
Various Artists
Restless

From the team that brought us ungrateful urchins the ‘Numbers From The Beast’ Iron Maiden tribute comes this utterly preposterous whammy-bar work-out of the biggest balled (and ballsed-up) Beatles blatherings known to man and his hairdresser. (Needless to say it shouldn’t be any other way). Carved from a chunk of lacquer-laden hair that fell out of CC Deville’s head in the bygone era pre-grunge at a time when a Jackson guitar with fine-tuners and locking nut meant burger, blow-job and beer at the Rainbow Bar ‘n’ Grill, in your own booth too (so long as you could prove ownership of a BC Rich ‘Bitch’ too).

 As detestable as much of the scouse mop-top muppets vastly overrated catalogue verily is the fact that these songs remain standing and survive the fastidious, frenetic torrent of sweep-picked arpeggios, dive-bombed pinched harmonics, hairsprayed screeches implying more hernia than heart and multiple scale-swapping on a par with the most savoury suburban swingers party circa 1976 is testament to the unassuming strength of the songs.

Overall it’s not unlike Enuff Z’Nuff let loose in their wildest swirling, saffron scented fantasies. Worth blagging a backstage pass for to be mercilessy abused by Yngwie Malmsteen’s ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ ghost-train wreck where the world’s most celebrated psychotically ego-freak Swede crams in every note known to man and dogs with particularly sharp hearing resembling a hummingbird caught in the midst of a piranha feeding frenzy. Give or take a few uninspired renderings, namely Lemmy’s tired, bourbon treading yawn through ‘Back In The USSR’ and Billy ‘ZZ Top’ Gibbons geriatric shuffle through a ‘Revolution’ too easily quashed rather than causing castles to collapse – possibly the result of too much dope in an Amsterdam café bar laughing at Yngwie with Lemmy - it’s a deliciously overdressed and mildly hilarious distraction.

Breathlessly entertaining though all of this is nothing, but nothing surpasses ‘Hey Jude’. It doesn’t take half the imagination of Chris Holmes to realise in advance just what form this monster will take. Yep, not even Paul McFarteney can be held responsible for the ear-dissolving racket that Judas Priest’s ‘Ripper Owens unleashes from the bad-gut-lands of overblown musical indigestion. Yes, people, gargantuan GN’R mawkish squawking that would make Waxl cringe and deserves a medal commemorating ballad-ic bedlam. ‘November Rain’ will never seem quite so ridiculous and scrotum-squashing once your senses have been stripped bare by this barometer of bad taste and frenzied aural disembowelling.

Splendid. Who says metal has no sense of humour.
-Stu

The Exploding Hearts
Shattered
Dirtnap Records

So life is full of regrets right? Don’t act like you don’t have any. Me? I got plenty.

One of them is never seeing The Exploding Hearts live.

Sadly, none of us will. Vocalist, Adam Cox, bassist Matt Fitzgerald and drummer Jeremy Gage were all killed in a car accident returning from a gig in San Francisco in July of 2003. Guitarist Terry Six walked away, so to speak. Nobody really walks away from something like that.

Just looking at the cover for “Shattered”, the long awaited posthumous release from the Portland band makes me excited and sad. Their first (and technically only) record “Guitar Romantic” plays like the second coming of The Clash (I swear I hear Mick Jones every time I listen to “I’m a Pretender”). It’s further immortalized by the fact that not one of the cuts can be played on the radio. If you got love for vinyl (and I know you do) look for a reissue of “Guitar Romantic” in early 2007.

“Shattered” is filled with some alt-mixes from “Guitar Romantic”, early demos (including a couple of singles previously released by Pelado Records. Check out Red Invasion. Nice going Boston). There’s also some previously unreleased material.

“We Don’t Have to Worry Anymore” is the classic punk anthem. It delivers one of the greatest hooks on “Shattered” when Adam Cox croons “Forget about me in the summer”. As if I could.  “Making Teenage Faces”, happily reports that “someone shot the principal right in his he-ad…school is out forever and we’re glad that he’s de-ad”.

Wishing ill on authority figures is quantifiably, 100% punk rock. 

“Walking out on Love” is a highlight. Previously unreleased it gives you a clear glimpse into what The Exploding Hearts could have done if their time had not been cut short. I almost feel like I read about them in Leg McNeil’s  “Please Kill Me”. Back then, Punk was raging in full, putrid glory. On any given night, The Exploding Hearts might have taken the stage at CBGB’s and freaked everyone the fuck out. After the gig, they crash on the floor at Arturo Vega’s loft with Joey and Dee-Dee. Pretty much everyone from the New York punk scene did that at least once between 1974 and 1977.

The entire record plays like vintage 70’s punk, Generation X style. It’s almost as if The Exploding Hearts were transplanted into the year 2000 by accident. Maybe if Johnny Thunders could have stopped sticking needles in his arms (and loads of other places) he might have written a song like “I’m a Pretender” (no offense Johnny, I love you). Lucky for us, The Exploding Hearts have made a potent and lasting contribution with “Shattered. It’s easily one of the most important punk releases in years.
-Cherrybomb

Blood Vessels
Self-titled
Teenage Heart

Boston punk ‘n roll powerhouse with a twin-guitar attack and a healthy sense of outrage. Opens with the bullet-riffing “Catholic Zombies” and keeps barreling away like Hank-era Black Flag with a Turbonegro twist through ten mayhem-baiting tracks. The chugging, constantly soloing axes really put these cats into super-rock territory, but Niff’s gruff vox and the relentless desperation of the lyrics is all pure 80’s punk, mad as hell and willing to blacken a few eyes to prove it. If you dig a stab of Sabbath in your slampit cocktail, slap these brawlers on the stereo. Then duck.
-Sleaze

Noble Rot
Noble Rot
Angry Picnic

If it wasn’t for Rock City Crimewave’s latest spectacular spook piece, Infinite Midnight, I’d have to say that Noble Rot’s self-titled debut is the best thing I’ve heard come blasting out of the New England rocktosphere since Cracktorch’s …Is Not the Problem. Now, I don’t know exactly where Noble Rot (formerly The Drags) got their cow punk sound from, but it’s here, man. And it’s shameless. Somewhere between The Drags’ cocaine fuelled juvenility, Rich Hoss’ house parties, and Noble Rot’s sudden rock appreciation, these fuckers found a way to suture the Americana of cow punk with the snarl of gutter punk for an all-mighty derisive assault aimed at the kind of dudes who stab each other with broken pieces of glass while the band spurns them on from behind a chain link fence. Do they have one of those in Charlie’s Kitchen? Probably not, but if Noble Rot comes around they might want to think about putting one up. Listen, you might be reading a handful of reviews for this album in the near future, and the band will probably get compared to Motorhead or Nashville Pussy, which is not an unfair assessment but an easy point to make given Rich Hoss’ guttural vox, but when I say that “Mission Hill” sounds like Social Distortion covering “House of the Rising Sun,” I fucking mean it. So rot on, brothers and sisters, rot on.
-Jeff

The Surgens
Songs Of Sadness, Misery and Abuse
Fat and Bulbous

“I’m a plain old country boy, A corn-bread lovin’ country boy,I raise Cain on Saturday But I go to church on Sunday…” – ‘Country Boy’ - Little Jimmy Dickens

So it came to pass that Britain’s best unsigned band ended up releasing their debut record themselves. All the better as no leash or saddle is straddled to this bucking untameable beast in aimless attempts at limiting their insensitively inventive slapstick ‘n’ tickle-billy. If old country cats worked hard all week, sinned on Sat’day and repented in church come Sunday then The Surgens are unapologetically shame-spattered, lurching in mid-sermon as though swaggering through the swinging doors of the local ‘Toke ‘n’ Tart’, boots full of piss and random vegetables stolen on the way, reeking of rotgut with brains raddled like ragtime in a wrecking pit pausing en route to pass-out to ask the Priest for a pint. Bleary-eyed bugbears with Scotch-scarred smocks like all classic, cassock-besmirching carousers creeping in back-alleys they inflect whole fields full of soul into arrangements like Captain Beefheart took a licking from Jackson Pollock at a village fete before Tom Waits hauled ‘em off to cool down in a Mississippi mud-bath (‘Man Cheatin’ Man’) and the glorious lonesome on the range alone with your stains titular nod to Leadbelly of ‘Goodbye Nadine’.

The custard pie fighting, gravy gurgling fiesta of ‘Death of a Politician’ does the Charleston with your intestines, while ‘Big Fat Calf’ shoots the soles off your shoes and keeps you dancing around your neighbours allotments and potting sheds like a drunk auditioning for Monty Python. ‘Twisted Brain’ is every serial killer hollering in a chain-gang (‘Just wait till you see your head nailed to your knees / And your feet swinging from the front door’), an ‘Arnold Layne’ type tale of suburban sociopathy scripted by ‘Just William’ conker-coshing chaps with cartoonists curiosity for the absurd pummelling polka-dots on your pre-cornceptions.

Welcome with arms as wide as the other limbs of a Whalley Range hooker that they proclaim amongst their influences the best and worst music, allow them with customary politeness to customise your best coat with the contents of a colostomy bag full of crotchets and quavers squeezed through a sausage machine, and when veiled valediction ‘Drunken Angel’ has availed itself of rattling round your rib-cage and sailed off to the Avalon for soaked sinners, why, raise a toast to the dukes of the Peterborough delta and chortle that this astonishingly lovely record of virulent lunacy is the loss of UK labels with the cerebral matter of a common clam. Stonking. Nose-tweakingly so.
-Stu

The Drones
Gala Mill
ATP

The follow up to last years Australian Music Award winning ‘Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By’ ‘Gala Mill’ is another astonishing instalment of thorny, agitated ballads of anguish that dance on your tear ducts and perform dulcet dramas conjured from a distant unconscious as though they’re dispatches from a frontier once thought to be uncharted but now found to have been settled and abandoned. Like Crazy Horse tossed on high seas storms before beaching on an arid riverbed of dreams comprising the decomposing vestiges of the blues as bedrock these nine hymns hewn from are as intimate as the Cowboy Junkies ‘Trinity Sessions’ and are simply as spellbinding as the most sinister of campfire tales reflecting the ashen faces of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Songs of Love and Hate’. Gareth Liddiard’s sawdust and gravel rasp rustles through twisted reeds creating swirling patterns in the dust from the politically charged polemic of ‘Jezebel’ through the parched tear-thirsty poetry of ‘Dog Eared’ and the suppurating surges oozing from ‘I Looked Down The Line And Wondered’, while, being as mercurial as pagan monuments, ‘I Don’t Ever Want To Change’ swoops and soars with spluttering Strummer-ed guitars just out of frequency for Radio Birdman. Droning rumbles that are the real folk blues for a modern age in meltdown, gouged out the earth with a grimace and a grainy, sepia grin displaying the solemn grace of a preacher that knows glory is for only the most gullible. A sprawling magnificence that should cause as much ardour as they do agitation, as they cut deeper than skin, mystically akin to forty days and forty nights in fifty-four minutes on the road to gnosis. Mythical and magical. 
-Stu

The Bone Machine VS Mutzhi Mambo
Storie Nere
Billys Bones

A real monster mash from the home of The Hormonas here, thankfully bereft of the cheese encrusted overkill of the ‘Freddy vs Jason’ thrash-metal with a double-bass splatter clichéd cash-ins of many psychobilly coffin-cribbers that torment us nowadays. Despite titles like ‘Io Sono Il Diavolo’ (I Am The Devil’) and ‘Le Porte Dell’Inferno’ (‘The Gates of Hell’ or something) the demon-inferring sermons of The Bone Machine are more the vaudevillain Voodoo of Screaming Jay Hawkins than thirteenth rate horrorpunk, being incandescent with classical Rockabilly stylings taken roughly any which way it fucking comes by early Meteors swing, evinced by their stunning stomp all over a more than ready, willing, gagged, bound and gasping for it ‘Questi Stivali Sono Fatti Per Camminare’ (ayuss, that be ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’), and some swivel-hipped temptress titillating guitar tiki-fying testimonies none more so than on ‘Lei E’ Andata Via’ (‘She’s Gone Away’, it seems). Mutzhi Mambo by their very name make you wanna twist, shout, shake and indeed mambo as though you’re a Zorro style hero out to rescue the demure doll who jest so happened to get herself stranded in a minefield of mamba’s at the height of Texas tornado season, all with the dash and élan of a suave suited sod, spy or, as they’re attired on the cover, a set of Sicilian wiseguys, sorta like Nick Cave surfing in to declare fiesta open ‘cept The Cramps got there first and laced the ice-cubes with cleavage-corking concoctions. And don’t let the fact that it’s all hollered in Italian cause you to stumble either, as the language really lends itself to the inherently ghoul-groping stomp of ‘Billy investing it with the threateningly seductive dark allure of a vampires stare.
-Stu

The Earaches
Time on Fire
Steel Cage Records

The last two months have brought a dizzying array of super-charged garage rock releases from the Pacific Northwest. Vindaloo, The Hands, The Blakes, The Briefs and Ice Age Cobra are creating quite the deviant noise disturbance in Seattle. The Heartaches are making extra-crunchy sounds in San Diego.

With the release of “Time on Fire” The Earaches take The Garage That Rock Built and burnt it to the fucking ground. “Time on Fire” follows up the bands seething 2005 release “Fist Fights, Hot Love” (the cover art is super hot). Taking the garage band DIY ethic to the hilt, they produced, mixed and mastered “Time on Fire” at drummer Steve Jones’s studio. Jones stepped in following the tragic death of Alan Wright in 2004. Also new to The Earaches lineup is bassist, Oni Timm.

“So into You” is a radio friendly garage rock dream. “I forget the Alphabet honey when I watch you walk”. It’s lyrics like this that only add fuel to the fire that is “Time on Fire”. In fact, this whole record is on fire. My ears are on fire. My pants are…well…forget my burning pants.

You know when you get a song stuck in your head? Usually it’s something horrible like Bennie and the Jets or the theme to “Hawaii Five-O”. Currently, I have every song on “Time on Fire” stuck in my head with heavy repeat action on “So Into You”.

On “Useless” vocalist August Henrich spews forth soul-sucking angst that would make George Bernard Shaw proud. He’s not eating well and his flat’s a mess. “Music is the brandy of the damned”. The Earaches are pain I can’t do without. It all makes perfect sense.

“Your No Good For Me” is one minute and four seconds of pure emotive adrenaline. On “Our Own Thing,” Henrich celebrates that “People see us and they get confused. But we don’t mind ‘cause we like the abuse”.

Abuse by rock and roll is a rite of passage. Think about it. Loud music shatters your eardrums. The bar destroys your liver. Then you stay up too late ‘cause the headliner doesn’t hit the stage till 12:30 a-fucking-m. Don’t even get me started about the walking STD’s that are rock band groupies.

So lets be clear. Music should loud and Bourbon cold. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Fuck you very much for asking. But seriously, what was the best thing that ever happened to a groupie? I’ll tell you. Gene fucking Simmons writes a song about you called “Plaster Caster”. Then you get live in a house alone with a bunch of plaster penises. Stay in school kids.

It’s impossible not to compare The Earaches to The Stooges. “Time on Fire” has a dirty rock swagger reminiscent of “Raw Power”. “Time on Fire” is seething with cock-sure lyrics, riffy guitar licks (complete with feedback) and the proud return of the two-minute jam.

KEXP, local Seattle radio station, and local music champions, also are huge fans. KEXP has listeners around the world. Their streaming feed is offered in multiple formats, with shows and live performances archived, so you can listen “on demand” (Check out “Sonic Reducer,” three hours of weekly hardcore punk. It’s noisy and it might hurt you). KEXP’s support has done nothing but good things for The Earaches. And they deserve it.

The Earaches are DIY to the core. “Time on Fire” proves that it is still possible for a band to make their own record. “It Just Ain’t Right” to do it any other way.

Fuck, if this record ain’t right, I don’t know what is. “Time on Fire” puts The Earaches at the top of the garage rock heap. Right where they belong.
-Cherrybomb

Haunted George
Bone Hauler
Dead-Beat

Spectacularly bare-boned garage-splatter from George Fellow, a death-obsessed loner from the Californian desert who cranks out these grating one-man-band doom-ditties in between whiskey binges and rattlesnake hunting parties. Calling this skeletal drawl sub-Cramps is like calling beef jerky sub-prime rib – I am sure there’s a beating voodoobilly heart in here somewhere, but it’s covered in muck and clogged with truck grease. Stick around through rattling graveyard romps like “The Embalmer” and “Road Ghoul” and you’ll be rewarded with the most terrifying cover of Roky Erickson’s “Night of the Vampire” you will ever hear. I suppose there are many adjectives I could use to describe Bone Hauler, but really, fiendish is the word for it.
-Sleaze