CD REVIEWS August, 2007.
(note: I'm too laz...er, busy to do all the record label links. Just google 'em.)
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We Heart the Blowtops
V/A 7"
Big Neck Records

As near as I can figure, this is a Blowtops tribute: two records (one on translucent red vinyl, one on opaque white) and 6 songs by different bands covering songs by The Blowtops, who, for the uninitiated (like me a few scant minutes ago), formed in Buffalo in 1998 and apparently  wowed the NY scene with their violent musical ways. (Good for them.) On the red album, Jay Reatard is at his scratchy, screaming best performing “Venom Victims Wine,” followed by the funeral parlour organs and bassline of Tractor Sex Fatality’s version of “Judas Order”; the record comes to a (partially-decomposed-but-somehow-still-conscious)  head with the Vilent Lover’s Club’s eerie promise/threat “I’m comin’ for ya” from “Phone Call From A Corpse.” This trifecta, dare I say, makes the whole zombie aesthetic seem, well, sexy as fuck. The white album opens with the Mistreaters playing “Cannibal Lust” at the psychobilly sock-hop, continues with “Brasshead Smash,” by The Radio Beats (think a 28 Days Later zombie attack-fast and brutal and bloody), and ends with the tribal beats and electric razor guitars of The Trailer Park Tornados doing “Within These Walls.” I prefer the red album, although I can’t quite put my (chewed off by a zombie-dog) finger on why, but the collection as a (ripped-apart-by-an-army-of-flesh-eaters) whole is pretty good. If you like zombies. And zombie music. Which I do.    

-Holly

The Genders
Virgin No. 72
Dead Sea Records

Our favorite Israelites are back, this time with a full length that is every bit as snaky, shaky, and downright swanky as their eight song demo released sometime…um, whenever it was released. Details aren’t really important. You just need to know that The Genders are still as dizzying as ever, with tongue-in-cheek lyrics over top a smorgasbord of rock n’ roll styles: opener “Stick to My Guns” is a shameless “Wild Flower” Cult rip-off about some sort of rock revolution, the title track is a Guns-inspired chainsaw arena rock salvo about the ol’ Middle East tradition of fucking your brains out in the afterlife, “Hot Pants” is about…well hot pants, and sounds like Lux Interior fronting AC/DC, “Someone” is a Stones-y ballad on the pangs of love, “Big Wheels” is a rockabilly ditty about SUVs, gasoline, and war, and so on and so on. Oh, and we can’t forget the inclusion of their seminal hit “Horatio,” this time with more cowbell. Because cowbell makes everything a little better, see? The Genders got it down, baby, and are happy to rock their way from Ramallah to you.

-Jeff

The Wildhearts
The Wildhearts
Round Records

I’m sure I really don’t have to go into much detail here, do I? It’s the fucking Wildhearts, Jack. It’s the reason we’re all here. They’ve been the true kings of sleaze pop since 1993, and this here self-titled opus is true-to-form fare, which simply means it’s the nastiest and catchiest shit put to tape. Sure, Ginger spends a few tracks shouting verses over chug-chug diesel riffs, but the rest of the time it’s the sweet serenade of candy-coated choruses that make your face and heart melt into one giant puddle of pleasure. Of course, the most interesting thing about The Wildhearts is that it is without question the most heavy and progressive Wildhearts album ever, with two songs clocking in at over eight minutes, driven home by a dauntless and awesome musicianship rarely seen by the band before. Hook after hook, riff after riff…this album proves that The Wildhearts are simply one of the most brilliant bands out there.

-Jeff

Pride Tiger
The Lucky Ones
EMI

This is the best album of the year. I know there’s still some time left, but I’m feeling awfully confident today that there ain’t nothing out there right now or coming down the pipe that’s gonna even come close to matching the relentless riffing and twin guitar harmonies of The Lucky Ones. This is Thin Lizzy incarnate, with “Fill Me In” and “The Lucky Ones” the best examples of Lynott’s long reach, true good time music to the core, and Canada (or the world) hasn’t heard intensely catchy organic rock like this since The Illuminati. Add to that the fact that a bunch of the Tigers used to sweat metal for fellow Vancouver brothers 3 Inches of Blood and you get a faint underlying heaviness behind it all, namely on songs like “56 Days” and “Let ‘Em Go.” So play this one at your next party or give it to the DJ at your favorite club and you’ll look like a rock n’ roll genius. Fuck yeah.

-Jeff

RTX
Western Xtermination
Drag City

-Jeff

Oh! The Pretty Things
Oh! The Pretty Things
Self-released

This four song debut EP from slick and salty Toronto rockers Oh! The Pretty Things is as southern and charming as it is blue collar and brawling, kind of like the musical equivalent of whiskey shots, used Fenders, overstuffed suitcases, and sweet girls with blue eyes, which isn’t that far off from The Pretty Things (60s version, natch), I suppose. It’s music for hopefuls, really, or drunkards who at least hang on to hope with a desperate conviction. And if that makes sense to you, then this is your type of music.

-Jeff

Alice Cooper Shocks Kentucky State
(live show)

There is a time and a place for everything, and the time and place for Alice Cooper was in front of me at The Kentucky State Fair for free. Gates weren’t open til 7pm so I browsed the thick selection of livestock I would somewhere in the near future be found devouring. I don’t grow too attached to animals because I’ve been known to hunt my own meat, but Alice Cooper is definitely an exception. This fetus-eating rock monster was fairly tiny from my middle row seats, but I fell for him right from beginning, like a puppy with dark circles in a tiny window of an inhumane society. Just because I could barely see him up in the stadium didn’t mean I couldn’t hear what Alice Cooper has to say, and has been saying for more than thirty years now. Inarguably, he single-handedly altered the conformity inside rock n roll. He took candy-coated rock n roll in the late sixties and put it in a meat grinder, spread it all over his bony cheeks, and spat it back in the faces of the record companies and radio stations who at one point tried to sustain this beast. He’s living proof that you cannot exactly tame an animal from the wild, considering he grew up in Detroit. If Alice Cooper were to pick up writing children’s books, they couldn’t put them on shelves high enough to keep him off the streets. He has power over higher corporations more than ever now, simply because Alice Cooper has became a manmade industry. With his own radio station called ‘Nights With Alice Cooper’ and his sports bar and restaurants chain, Cooperstown, it’s safe to say he’s enterprise on the rise like Trump suite. By now, even his ants are eating off of silver spoons and plates.

Rumor had it that he came in town a week earlier for Fuzzy Zoellers golf tournament which happens to be a skip, hop and creek away from my place. Fuzzy Zoellar (famous golf pro) hasn’t exactly been an ideal neighbor considering the many lavish parties he throws with crappy jazz blurring through the valley. As loud and large as Alice Cooper has lived, in order to balance out his yin and yang, it’s no wonder he’s into golfing instead of train spotting, except I’d imagine he dropped all ties with his old junkie friends for new pill-popping politicians. Sober and sixty-something, Alice Cooper has maintained his grace on stage. Either he can hold his breath for a really long time or they had mad props to stage him being hanged. Dennis Dunaway with hell-bending bell bottoms has sadly been replaced with three mini coopers in leather pants. This ballet dancer in a tatteres toot-too doing back flips apparently bore the birth of Alice Cooper’s unborn child. With lungs a mile long, he did “Only Women Bleed”, “No More Mister Nice Guy” and “Billion Dollar Babies”.

In ’66 an intensely skinny Michigan kid named Vincent Furnier renamed his high school band ‘The Spiders’ and used giant webs for backdrops. Before we could blink from a Chinese torture treatment, Alice Cooper was born under a bad sign once  Frank Zappa saw major dollar signs in his bloodshot eyes in the 7 in the morning. It wasn’t until the chicken incident in Toronto was misreported, and right before the release of their second album that Cooper took off on nonstop flight to stardom. Since then he has rode on the coattail of his greatest hits forever and a day now. When you’re a 25 hit wonder verses a one hit, you can very well do this. To this day he, pulls off every performance minus the drugs, booze, and mangled chickens with standing ovations, but it’s not like any of us we’re ever really sitting still in the first place.

Back in the stands, my picture was taking by two handicap metalheads, and I danced the night away drenched in sweat in the midst of all my family and friends. It’s rare that I see everybody all together but thanks to Alice Cooper hosting one helluva high school reunion, I can. He is truly the world’s oldest living teenager that took classic rock and introduced it to the Phantom of the Opera thus creating shock rock.  We can thank him for hundreds of bands that picked up on his gimmicks. Marilyn Manson would have never started mimicking mannequins without him. Slipknot might as well forget they ever existed, and hopefully will be inspired soon to do this. Glenn Danzig and Rob Zombie are more bastard sons of Cooper that make Kane and Abel look Jevohah witnesses. The list just gets longer and darker, and any black metal band owes mad paint props to the man.

Rewind to the eighties, and Cooper was found in more cinemas and wrestle manias than touring. The recovering alcoholic found something better like, snakes to throw at The Honky Tonk Man, besides pounding liquor. Happiness through success is a lot harder than it sounds, apparently. Unfortunately, you cant win them all, so he didn’t kill himself in the meantime. This is the reason he still does what he loves. Besides when do you ever find a cokehead, alcoholic that brags about how much cocaine he’s done on a platinum album? That’s because he doesn’t have one. Unlike Hollywood socialites, the man honors every opportunity and paycheck that has been handed to him. It’s possible that he boasts about being elected because he honestly makes a positive role model with a twisted altered ego. He’s always kept the ego on stage where it belongs. I don’t know the man personally, but somehow I manage to see right through his snake eyes. He’s a father and husband by day and an axe murderer by night. Long Live the Teenage Frankenstein!

-Alice Strutter