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CD REVIEWS November, 2007.
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*NEW* Chili Cold
Blood
-Holly
Iced Earth
-Jeff Alley
Dukes
- Stu Gibson
Brown
Brigade
-Jeff
Geriatric Unit Hardcore as Harold Shipman, this is the ultimate in extreme noise terror. Brutal, mainly sub-minute long songs defecate on the watered down wank-stained wuss core that wears a hardcore mask. While it’s not pleasant and shit on Jesus in jest, not everything is in the world, unfortunately it’s not even remotely unpleasant in a gloriously righteous way, it just sorta sounds like you’re being digested by the acid in a rather large anaconda’s stomach. - Stu Gibson
Lions in
the Street Ok, bear with me here because the details are sketchy at best. Vancouver’s Lions in the Street used to be called The Years. A few years back, as The Years, they signed a major label deal and began recording an album. Then the label dropped them, sent them packing, and the recordings became stuff of legend, 70s inspired blues n’ roll tracks of desolation and desperation that were now lost forever. Well, apparently not lost forever, because said major label has seen fit to release these songs proper. And they’re doing it, much to the chagrin of the band, under their Lions in the Street moniker while titling the album The Years. Are you with me so far? Good. Now, of course, the longhairs in LITS will tell you that this isn’t really a Lions in the Street album because they were a different band back then, when they were The Years, and they might even tell you not to listen to it at all because, ‘Fuck major record labels,’ and my guess is they’d run me down with their VW van if they saw me standing on the side of the road for even giving this album a review, but the fact remains that, politics aside, this is some good shit, man. It proves that the 70s was the best decade for music, and with each strum of the Fender, with each twinkling of the ivory, they pay due diligence to the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Faces, the Allman Brothers, and even Lou Reed. If I had this one with me when I started traveling across the US on a bus this past summer, I might’ve stayed on the road longer than I did. As it was, listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” only got me so far. As for LITS, they’ve got that ramblin’, gamblin’ spirit, and as such they’ve resorted to the DIY approach, locking themselves in a basement with nothing more than an 8-track unit, broken microphones, and the will to persevere. They recorded a five song demo, Cat Got Your Tongue, and made it available as a free download off their web site (take that record labels!), and are now in the process of recording their debut album; their real debut album, as opposed to this one, which is The Years’ debut album, even though The Years are Lions in the Street. Or were, or something. I don’t know. Listen, what I do know is that you should get your hands on this one anyway because it’s pure gold, a treasure of sorts, and reeks, in a good way, of better days gone by. Or just go download the Cat Got Your Tongue demo because you’ll still get the idea and the band would prefer it if you did that anyway. Support longhaired rock n’ roll! -Jeff The
Deep Eynde
- Stu Gibson
Sixx:
A.M.
-Jeff
Trashtown Thrillers
- Stu Gibson
My Shaky
Jane I’ve got a lot of music to review, so let’s not fuck around and get right to it: This
You might recognize this from a review I wrote back in August. Anyway, yes, the band changed their name, recorded a bunch more songs, gave their new album their old band name, and still sound exactly the same, which is why it was best, and easiest, to repeat myself, because I’m still right the second time around. Anyway, My Shaky Jane have a lot of good vibe, and can be tender at times, and I think if someone decided to put some dough into their production they’d really kick. -Jeff The
Sick Ones Volume 1: Psychobilly Compilation
- Stu Gibson
C’mon
-Jeff
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*NEW*
Black Joe Lewis & Cool
Breeze
-Holly
Red
Lorry Yellow Lorry
- Stu Gibson The
Mob
- Stu Gibson
Powderfinger
- Stu Gibson
Heartbreak Engines
- Stu Gibson
Demented Are Go
Whether it was the sort of merciful fates that new guitarist Lex Luther brought wrapped in a pall of eternally infernal sin upon his arrival for 1988’s KICKED OUT OF HELL opus is possibly known only to padded cell walls. Mirroring Sparky’s delightful tales of politeness-plaguing pantomaim party-pieces like Cripple In The Woods, Sick Spazmoid and Human Slug this Luther sure played the boogie in a mighty strange way, while again covers of Cast Iron Arm and Old Black Joe are nailed by the knackers to the rack and ruined in the best, basest ways. Still in fine fettle, fit as fiddles and in literally rude health after all this time skating waves of sickness it’s time to see where it all went so wonderfully wrong. - Stu Gibson Dead
Kennedys
- Stu Gibson Guana
Batz
- Stu Gibson Peter
Pan Speedrock
- Stu Gibson
Wishbone Ash
-Stu Gibson In
Goth Daze 2 A perfect companion piece to eating the leftovers of your Hallowe’en pumpkin soup this collection of vids from the genre that never actually existed anywhere ever is a lovely light-hearted piece of armchair anthropology to enthuse about, or hide away under your bed for when all your housemates have gone out to indulge in a little arcane viewing pleasure at your leisure. As with many comps and especially with goth there’s the fatally brilliant (Fields Of The Nephilim, Lords of the New Church, Gun Club, Inca Babies) and the inexplicably, though humorously, shite (Hagar The Womb, Ligotage, Cuddly Toys, Rubella Ballet) that not even Goths know about interred among these twenty-six sacrificial slaughterings of celluloid, along with those who straddle both camps like Alien Sex Fiend and Christian Death all back in the days when videos cost about a fiver (see Creaming Jesus’s quite wonderful mauling of The Cure’s A Forest). You also get the comedy Sisters clones (The Wake – natch!!) and a harrowing car-crash between Nico and Bowie’s Heroes too for your smudged make-up sins Crimp and save, my angels. - Stu Gibson
Japrocksampler – How The Post-War Japanese Blew Their Minds On Rock ‘N’ Roll
Giving a background to the traditionally conservative Japanese culture as it clashes on the Western rock thing and taking in the whole Rock’n’rollercoaster ride from early copyists, through the surf-garage era and onto heavy, pschyedelicised progressive meltdowns in the seventies, read how this pantheon of artists, poets, revolutionaries and gung-ho heroes of the gonzoid refracted each new musical development filtering in from abroad through their own culture’s precision, added traditional elements and invented a whole hit and miss horde of rock-gloop awaiting tentative toes to trawl through. Including the author’s own Top 50 (c’mon give the guy his own radio show!) and detailed overviews of key bands such as Speed, Glue & Shinki and Les Rallizes Denudes (not to mention his admirably loving dismissal of Murahatchibu) an impossibly exotic lost world is unearthed through Cope’s addictive fandom. - Stu Gibson
Marooned – The Next Generation Of Desert Island
Discs
Interestingly, it’s the arguably more unlikely offerings that come across the more pleasing, namely Anthony Miccio’s entertaining discourse on Dio, Matt Ashare’s rather bemused bow-down to Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and Tom Breihan on rappers Brand Nubian. Even those that drop beats, such as the confused and impenetrable eulogy to Stephen Stills and Scott Seward’s eloquent but overly enigmatic prosyletization of Divine Styler still provide pause to reflect on what you’ve bought. - Stu Gibson
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Chili Cold Blood
plays the
blues. Or, as the Austin, Texas band likes to put it, “black and blue cowboy
metal.“ (From this pair of songs, I can’t quite tell where the “cowboy metal”
part of their sound comes from, but I’m sure it manifests itself somewhere.)
“Why Baby Why” chugs along like a graffitied railway car full of hobos with
harmonicas (even though there is nary a harmonica to be heard) heading through
the Mississippi delta. “Slow Down” sounds like the trainload of hobos finally
got to where they were going, and after a sweltering day of back-breaking manual
labour (picking cotton, perhaps), the hobos made their way to the gin mill,
shouldering their way through the prostitutes fanning their glistening bosoms to
get to the bar where the men ordered shots of whiskey while the old black guy in
the corner wailed a mournful tune on his harmonica (even though there is still
nary a harmonica to be heard). These are some sweet, sweet blues (even without
the harmonica), and I was slightly unnerved to learn that not one of the band
members was an old black dude. That’s how sweet these blues are. 
Iced
Earth is back with a story 10,000 years long spanning over two albums and
featuring the fictional character Set Abominae, who’s like Iced Earth’s version
of Eddie. He’s been on all their album covers pretty much, and his impending
birth, or arrival, if you will, is chronicled here on Framing Armageddon
(Something Wicked Part I), their ninth studio album, which includes
prophecies and high councils and exacting Setian revenge on humans. I imagine it
will all make sense to you if you’re a hardcore Iced Earth fan or spend a lot of
time in your mom’s basement playing World of Warcraft, but you don’t need to be
a metal geek to appreciate Iced Earth’s epic bolts of horror-inspired power
metal, which usually brings to mind villagers with torches, abandoned amusement
parks, broken mirrors, or porcelain dolls come to life – or, in this case,
majestic and other-worldly battles of days gone by. Not unlike stuff you might
get from Dio, Maiden, Annihilator, or King Diamond, natch. Assuming everyone’s
finally come to terms with singer Matt Barlow’s departure four years ago (you
never know…metal heads are quite particular), then Tim “Ripper” Owens is
the perfect man for the job. Where Barlow was powerful and deadly, Owens is evil
and cunning and his metal-God wail coupled with Iced Earth’s signature choir
choruses make the perfect stage for this kind of operatic undertaking. All told,
Framing Armageddon is 19 songs of Jon Schaffer’s architectural splendor,
the kind of metal magic he’s built an impressive and long Iced Earth career
with. And it will all continue next year with Revelation Abomination
(Something Wicked Part II), so get familiar with this one in now, basement
boy, because Set’s on his way and humans he will slay.
Well
well well, these merry Canadian mavericko’s sure shoot to the top of the class
with extra merits, distinctions and detentions with lusty lady lab technicians
by having an opening track called If This Ain’t Rockabilly…You Can Suck My
Balls! that catalogues all that those too hip for their authentic fifties
pants priests prize most and denouncing them for the desperately dull
detail-Nazis that they are – you got it, Bettie Page girls (are these the only
rockers to point out that the old girl was rather patently as sexy as a
pig-sty), martini cocktail sipping clichés, hot-rods and gambling - there really
is more to life than tramps and trucks, eh Bruce? As they deftly demonstrate on
sly and earnestly dirty smut-stokers Shave That Poodle, Dirty White
Girl, …On My Face, She’s So Flat and (I Broke Your Hymen)
You Broke My Heart that could make Lux n’ Poison Ivy blush
underneath the demure wrapping. 
After a
bit of a break it seems while mainman Craggy kicked his heels through the
stage in psychobilly The Koma Katz and played recruitment consultant,
the South-East’s main sorcerers of stained fantabulously trashtastically
tainted Rock’n’Roll are back rebooted if not re-branded, turning your uptown
down like a Stegosaur shopping for childrens toys. To See You Run breaks
jail, belches black smoke and burns tyres at the Bulldog Bash while Tear It
Up unleashes some of that psycho static making the devil dance back to his
drawing board and the title track burns down candles and loses talk in fine
swirling Jacobites style.
Twenty-five tracks in the CD store, twenty-five tracks and if you need more then
you’ll fucking get some come Volume 2 time. But for now this is right in time to
fill stockings and any other crevice and cavity you sick cunts might want caving
in, charting the Psycho scene as it stands currently across this whole wasted
world (well, America and Europe). Having long mutated into a noxious niche all
its own far removed from the hot-rodded rockabilly of instigators like The
Meteors and King Kurt the leprotic lovers included here by and large
fall into the horrorpunk pit of entrails and dismembered limbage but when you
have The Creepshow, The Matadors and Koffin Kats on
(severed) hand amongst the obscurer residents of corpseville like Robin
and The Brains and the less typical Joe Hellraiser then you’d kiss
the contents of crypts to get the diseases herein and stay absolutely sick
without salvation. Brings a whole new meaning to slip inside this house. 
Ah, there is that
harmonica! This cat has got some Funk, brothers and sisters, with a capital
F. And are those shades of James Brown that I detect in the vocal stylings
of Black Joe? Why, I do declare that they are! Sadly, this
grew-up-poor-but-is-now-decidedly-middle-class university-educated white
girl living in the suburbs has not got the funk. (And, trust me,
she’s tried to find it.) She’s got soul, this girl, and sometimes she’s got
the blues, but she seems to be lacking in the funk department. Which is why
she probably wouldn’t feel the urge to listen to this record on any sort of
regular basis (which is not to say that you shouldn’t, should you be lucky
enough to possess some funk yourself). Despite her lack of funk, however,
she does find the smouldering sax of “I Don’t Mind” and the cool desperation
of “Please” rather Fuckable, with a capital F. Perhaps this girl has got
some Funk in her, after all…
Despite
the double blow to their skinny white ribcages of being in possession of a name
so bad it’s possibly a lethal weapon at least deserving of an asbo if they
appeared now, and that their most notable fact in piss-stinking rock bars the
world over is the conversation that goes ‘Weren’t they that band that The
Mission’s guitarist was in’, ‘No, it was the drummer’, ‘Oh’, The Lorries
here prove that to be a mite undeserving. Sure, don’t believe the sleeve-notes,
kids, for this is still goth but for tis proper goth that Goths deny nowadays
and so leave it to rest unwittingly thinking it’ll be ever unclaimed while they
ponce around with glow-sticks. But as a sage man in sago crumbs once said, it’ll
‘ever remain’ (or something – self-ed.). This reissued best of claptrap shows
that shorn of The Mission’s ridiculous pop-pomp and pretend poetry RLYL, at
their best, veered more between Bauhaus’ early alienated neon nightmares
and Big Black’s industrial meat-hook murders by the wharf, befitting a
band holed up in a decrepit old mill town (i.e. Leeds), like on the awesome
Chance, which just about alleviates the obvious Joy fucking
Division influence on contenders for leaves on the line sabotage like
Last Train. Barren, bleak, frequently sinister and scabrous but lacking the
beauty that The Chameleons managed to dredge out of their desperation
row. Things go clunk in the night. 
Ancient
anarcho-punk crusty-squat commune crusaders round up their unreleased and rare
(what, as gold dust? recordings on this twenty-track tirade. Contemporaries of
Crass but utterly forgotten (as the worth-a-read sleeve notes point out)
The Mob congregated around anarchist centres, squat-streets and the free
festivals that led from the counterculture days of Hawkwind at their height,
through punk’s underground and onto New Age Travellers and acid house raves in
fields and warehouses. Whilst from a time when change still seemed possible,
musically no mob rules here though. At their best these scratchy songs sound
like they were recorded in a half empty Frosty Jack can festooned with roaches
while the convoy travelled, or rattled, on, variously blasting Billy Childish
and The Fall but ultimately it’s as tedious as dragging huge stones
across the countryside to build a monument, but without the colossal outcome.
For archive addicts only.
Named
for Neil Young’s acclaimed opus they may well be but these Aussies have
none of the grit of that old grizzly replacing it with lighters-aloft earnestly
epic balladry of such insipidly slick heights that those same lighters flicker
and die within seconds on the eternally flaming pyre of AOR. More akin to the
call centre hold music of those mordant Maroon 5 munchkins than the dark,
derangedly spooky Americana you’d hope for, by which they make The Eagles
look revolutionary, and at their best fail to even recall more than a faint
ember of REM.
Third
salvo of supersonic, steamrollin’ rigorous mortice locking, loose n’ loaded
brawn rawk from these Demented Are Go approved Teutonic tailspinnin’
titans. So much so that Sparky makes a rare guest appearance on closer
Gunwitch. Not that they’re some sort of paltry copyists though. Scatological
slap-bass scurries about like a ferret ferociously fighting for fornication
rights around pop-chops hung out on hooks that’d make Leatherface lick
his lips before leaving serrated smears where your ears once were. Incessantly
savage yet weirdly anthemic, they mix pavement saw pincer movements of dive bar
debts and uncontained threats with a sleek metallic stadium slickness to create
a euphoric rush of insatiably emotive punk that is dispatched so coolly and with
such control as to be almost callous. 
The
tapped-tastic open casket-case that is Sparky’s Demented crew here have
their first two albums of sickobilly reissued. Veritable feasts of frenzied
deviancy, torrents of torture, comedic masochism, self-abuse, sadism and ingrown
pleasures. Reviled at the time by certain sections of the psychobilly clique
elite Demented have proved hugely influential and here’s the squat-scum swamp
whence the whole sordid saga began. Taking an aberrant glee in anything
abhorrent Sparky’s spasticated, carcinogenic larynx sputumises
cripple-crotched, crochet-brained classics like Pervy In The Park, PVC
Chair, Rubber Buccaneer, Pickled And Preserved and (I Was
Born A) Busted Hymen (you getting the picture? – Can you guess what it is
yet?), brings covers of Be Bop A Lula and Crazy Horses to their
knees, begging if not braying for mercy.
Folk-soaked muso psych comedown prog anyone? The Wishbones were from a land
where men balanced on one leg while playing, it was considered darned
impertinent to write songs less than five minutes in duration such was their
desire to herald new dawns whilst sprawled on bean-bags writing chaste epics on
guitars called Guinevere and Morgana, full of fancies and fantasy and pastoral
laments and reading Michael Moorcock. For all their intricacy and ambitious
arrangements this is ultimately insipid, rather self-satisfied and like aural
magnolia wallpaper. Ash buffs will nod in sage-like delight that this is a
deluxe 2CD reissue replete with radio sessions and live tracks. 
Following up his earlier exploration of German experimentalism in ‘Krautrocksampler’,
Cope brings the eminently entertaining mix of obsessive investigation and love
for the subject that he’s applied to all his previous works, from mammoth
archaeological accounts to his fascinating autobiographies. Never afraid to put
his foot down and unleash uniquely opinionated diatribes and curt asides,
‘Japrocksampler’ unhinges the trapdoor that obscures Western appreciation of a
whole wave of iconoclastic music to surf headlong into. 
After
drifting for nigh on thirty years since the release of the Greil Marcus edited
‘Stranded – Rock & Roll For A Desert Island’ (recently reissued, also through Da
Capo) this new compilation rounds up twenty pieces from a current raft of
critics. Covering a necessarily wider section than that original book as it was
issued on the cusp of the fragmentation of punk into new wave, the emergence of
hip-hop and rap and the pre-eminence of metal, no matter what the reader’s own
essential pick, these erudite glimpses into our evaluations of music and how it
affects us can be readily applied to any situation or your next Desert Island
Disc dinner party, and may even make you unearth some hitherto hidden gems
(well, possibly all but Dave Queens otherwise comically styled appraisal of The
Scorpions!).