I genuinely have no idea why I bought Holy Mountain Ancient Astronauts, I’m guessing it must have been recommended to me somewhere, somehow and let’s face it I’m not the hardest person in the world to sell stoner space rock to.

The process was definitely made easier by the fact Holy Mountain are on the Chemikal Underground label, just like Mogwai used to be, the fact that one of the Mountains was wielding a Gibson SG in a dramatic bare-chested fashion on the inner sleeve probably contributed, as did the fact that I have always wanted to own an LP with a track on it called ‘LV-42666’ by a Glaswegian band; dream = lived.

The aforementioned ‘LV-42666’ kicks proceedings off in fine style, it’s a driving propulsive riff that seems to get where its going by willpower and force alone.  We may be going into space but we’re having to work our passage, is the vibe.  This is sustained throughout Ancient Astronauts, there isn’t much fancy virtuosoing going on this here trip – riffs are fuzz heavy and fuzzing heavily all the way into orbit.

Except …

Except …

Except they never really quite get there for me.  I rated this album highly enough for it to take the highly-coveted #11 slot in my Top 11 LPs of 2014 but I’m a touch more ambivalent about it now.  All those years ago I wrote,

Frighteningly hairy heavy space rock from Glasgow, played as though the very devil himself was after the mortal souls; ’nuff said. My bad mood LP of the year – always made me rage a bit, before getting cheery again.

I don’t take that from it now*.  With the exception of a couple of tracks, including the opener and the suitably giddy ‘Star Kings’, there just isn’t enough variation and chops on show to keep me entertained.  I have no doubt at all that Holy Mountain could really pummel you into submission live, or indeed that the band could thrash the living saviour right out of lily-livered keyboard warriors like myself in a back alley, but they just don’t show enough here on Ancient Astronauts and it disappointed me.

Plus the lettering on the front cover is a bit pants, resembling hanging tendrils of Aztec snot: Absinthe Antelopes?  Antiseptic Australians?  Absolute Anteaters?

So I am sorry, but I’ll pass on this one; too much perspiration, not enough inspiration, or stonerspacestation.

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PS: The usual 1537 caveat applies here that Ancient Astronauts is a far better LP than I will ever manage to make, these guys went out there and did it and I just sit here in my grimy underpants typing away about nothing. They win.

*which is probably exactly why I’m better off reviewing LPs I’ve owned for 30 years than new releases.

She’s a woman
You know what I mean

One of my mate Ste and my favourite lyrics right there, from the track ‘Woman’ on Wolfmother.

Yup I’ll take a rough guess at what you mean fella:

• She’s more emotionally intelligent and empathetic?
• She doesn’t spend her time pointlessly obsessing about her hobbies?*
• Her skin is 25% less thick than a man’s due to lacking the effect of androgens?
• She’s always right in arguments? even when she’s wrong.
• Her sweat has a higher pH factor than man sweat?
• She doesn’t religiously alphabetise her records?*
• Women are the only primates who are busty all the time?**
• Says she doesn’t want chips^ with her meal but proceeds to eat yours?
• Throws underarm?
• Has a total inability to fold maps back up properly?
• Is just generally superior in most ways?

Who knows? it’s a complete mystery to me^^.  What isn’t though is just how hard and how brilliantly ‘Woman’ rocks out.  Just stick your brain in neutral and enjoy the ride downhill on the brilliant churning riff and, most exhilaratingly of all, some ace Jon Lord-esque organ from Chris Ross.

If you think, not incorrectly, that was rocktastic then brace yourself for pretty much my favourite rocker from the 2000’s ‘White Unicorn’.  Again forget about the lyrics, they’re just there to shape the vocal sound and just concentrate on the music and THAT FREAKIN’ GUITAR!!  The part where it dies down and then … and then … and then … Andrew Stockdale storms the castle walls with THAT RIFF is one of my favourite ever rock moments; it really is.  Wolfmother are retro rockers but ‘White Unicorn’ doesn’t really sound like anyone else, or even an amalgam of the greats it is their own little moment of utter genius, most bands don’t even manage that.

I remember the time around 2006 as being pretty flat in the rock cleavage landscape and I bought Wolfmother just for the chutzpah of the band’s name and the fact they were rocking a Frank Frazetta cover^*; the minimal nudity on which got them into trouble in the US, for Christ sakes people sort your priorities out! there are only two, strangely angled, boobs on show anyway.  A friend of mine at work was quicker off the mark than me and saw them in Liverpool in a small room the day before I bought the LP and rates it as one of his best gigs ever.  I saw them about 18 months later, in a much bigger room on their third go around of touring Wolfmother and they were pretty good but not totally into it, the original line up split not long afterwards and to my mind the band have only hit the heights very sporadically afterwards.

At the time of Wolfmother though the band were firing strongly on all cylinders and all three are great musicians, Myles Heskett really standing out on drums for me.  I liked the fact that as well as being influenced by all the usual hard rock suspects some other very entertaining sounds enrich the record.  I’m particularly taken with ‘Love Train’ which sounds a bit like White Stripes gone funk rock, but in a very good way – the bass tone is so deep and luxurious you could doggie paddle in it.  Considering it was a rescued B-side ‘Love Train’ is a remarkably good track, I don’t own it but there is a great dance remix of it out there too – yes, I do know what I just typed there and it is true.

Another little shimmy from left field is the scuffling, stuttering garage riffola of ‘Apple Tree’, where Stockdale goes all Ozzy O in the middle bit before helter-skeltering it all to a frantic finish back in the garage via a heroic guitar solo.  Great inventive stuff.

I shan’t bore you with the ol’ track-by-track routine, but here are some 1537 highlights for y’all:

• Chris Ross totally Rick Wakemanning his keys near the end of ‘Mind’s Eye’
• The fact the melody on ‘Pyramid’ really doesn’t do what you expect it to.
• That ‘Tales’ is actually called ‘Tales From The Forest of Gnomes’.
• The Led Zep III gone busker sheen of ‘Vagabond’.

The band soared high with Wolfmother, never to be repeated by them again.  Whatever the reasons this is a mostly excellent, always fun debut album, with boobs on the front cover.  Amen.

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*I concede that both these points may actually be the same point.

**as opposed to only during the nursing period.  True story.

^you might refer to them as fries, you strange foreign people, you!

^^as, ironically, are women.

^*whose Conan art, consisting invariably of bare-chested axe wielding barbarians and their E cup companions in chainmail bikinis, fired/fried my imagination as a kid to the point where I have developed a strong Pavlovian response, salivating uncontrollably at the mere sight of a massively muscled barbarian warrior.  Damn, something got cross-wired in there somewhere.

And on the drums, Gemini
On bass guitar, presenting, Pisces
On lead guitar, we have Aries
And on the microphone, Scorpio, go!!!!   (X-Ray Visions)

I can’t think of a record I’ve had more fun with in recent times than Clutch Psychic Warfare.  If you had to pick a single LP to embody all that’s groovy and fantabulousissima about rock music in 2017* then this is the one for me – it rocks dang hard (‘Firebirds’), it’s funny** (‘A Quick Death in Texas’), rousing (‘Son of Virginia’), clever (‘X-Ray Visions’) and it just rocks doubledang hard again (‘Noble Savage’).  Proper music, for proper people.

Lead off single ‘X-Ray Visions’ just really kicks all manner of derrière right from the opening seconds on, searing riffs and wild lyrical flights of fantasy involving CIA psychic attack experiments, possession by the spirits of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and horoscopes.  Whew! Just about the only topics I can think of that are missing from there are stamp collecting and chicken rearing.  The band is so tight, locking into a really tight groove behind Neil Fallon’s bellicose amiability, with the kind of chops you only earn after playing a million gigs in a million cities.  Scorpio, go!

My favourite track on Psychic Warfare today, an accolade that is very liable to change by sundown^ is the epic, ferocious, cowboy tinged rock of ‘Son of Virginia’.  Fallon’s sounds like God passing judgment on the world on this one and the band really hit it hard as it builds and builds.  I really do have no defences to this song and it’s line ‘I was thrown to the ground as my world broke asunder / Truly we are living in an age of wonder’ just slays me every time, for reasons I cannot quite put my finger on.

On a similar vein is the, appropriately, Texan flavoured ‘A Quick Death in Texas’, written as Psychic Warfare was being recorded in the titular state^^.  Name-dropping Billy Gibbons, this track amusingly tells the tale of a Yankee’s bad end, the band are having so much fun right here that it’s truly infectious.  Clutch are smart enough to realise that the aspect of ZZ Top that everyone misses when they pay tribute to them is their out-and-out loose funkiness, needless to say the boys add it here by the bucket load:

Just like Clutch I’ll play it fast and loose here, skip a few tracks and you get to the quite astonishing American gothic of ‘Our Lady of Electric Light’, set up by the short atmospheric instrumental ‘Doom Saloon’.  It takes the form of a vaguely country-affected waltz, all drama light and shade, with lyrics that could mean everything or absolutely nothing at all.  A lot of bands have 40 year careers without ever touching upon anything half as good as this.  This is just perfection squared:

She enters the bar room
And lifts her veil
With a voice like running water
She tells them her tale

To follow this with the kamikaze rock of ‘Noble Savage’ is just great sequencing, let’s face it Clutch know what they’re about by now.  This track just hurtles on past you, propelled by some particularly fine fretwork from Tim Sult, including a musical tilt of the hat to White Zombie.  Simple and as effective as a kick in the head.

For the sake of brevity I have missed out a slew of good tracks here, but I’d encourage you to have a good explore by yourselves – there are two-legged dogs, seductive witches, decapitation and colossi to be discovered lurking hither and yon on Psychic Warfare.  As I’ve said to anyone who’ll listen since I first thought of it 20 minutes ago, Clutch are rather unique denizens of our great musical continent of Rockadonia, they owe very little to the distant past, other than a brief stylistic nod or two, they are very much of here and very much of now.  It’s nice to be able to type that.

So basically my message is, if you like music and/or fun then buy this LP and I guarantee it will make you happier and up to 12.91% foxier than you were.  True story, I’d never lie to you, I’m a Scorpio, go!!

As a little twofer bonus thang here, I recently nabbed a RSD 2016 release by Clutch, where they released two outtakes from the Psychic Warfare sessions back into the wild.  A limited edition, one-sided etched precious, precious artefact Mad Sidewinder / Outland Special Clearance was worth all the shekels I parted with for it^*.  ‘Mad Sidewinder’ is a close cousin of their own ‘Earth Rocker’ all righteous chugging fury and some awesome playing from the rhythm section of Jean-Paul Gaster and Dan Maines in particular, there is a brilliant break-down section – this really rocks hard.  Imagine Monster Magnet without the burnout.

Goal setting, overachieving, are not among my top priorities
A better lesson, keep ’em guessing, and celebrate diversity
Manipulators are allergic to soul, how I love to frustrate them
What better time than here and now, re-evaluate the situation.

Damned liberal pinko rock-types! Time to tell them where to get off with all their evil agenda peddling respect and decency! Which is a theme that permeates ‘Outland Special Clearance’ too with its mutterings about Alex Jones, chaos and warfare, it’s fine but it doesn’t come wrapped up in as good a tune as ‘ … Sidewinder’.  Both tracks would have added to Psychic Warfare if they’d have made the cut and that is, from me, praise indeed.

Peace out.

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PS: some exemplary video-making right here:

*I know it’s from 2015, but it casts a big enough shadow.  So just lip up!

**always a prerequisite for greatness in my book.

^another definite indicator of a great album is when your fave track changes daily.

^^ha-ha, I said ‘titular’ again!

^*not too many to tell the truth, I still say if you don’t nab what you want on RSD just wait a bit until all the profiteers flock off and the prices come right down again, for most things.

It’s the dawn of the day and I’m crashed and I’m smashed
As it is I’m feelin’ like my chips are cashed
All of my clothes strewn all over the room   (Bright Light Fright)

I drink to you, your mind, her ass
We’ll take a drink and break the glass   (Critical Mass)

Blinking in the wan sunlight of another early commute I decided I needed a musical pick-me-up, something hostile, raucous and genuinely dangerous.  A renowned international tastemaker such as myself could have resorted to cutting edge avant-hard Bulgarian electronica, or something unsavoury and growling from Ukraine, but mid-scroll I realised that the most defiant, totally baked-not-faked, radically punked, stoned monolithic, provocative LP in my collection is in fact Aerosmith Draw The Line.  This album does not want to be your friend and if you cut yourself on it, you’d probably lose a limb.

Following on from the band’s megahit LPs Draw The Line was less-released, more walked into the room onto the bottom of someone’s shoe, in 1977.  Whereas its predecessor, Rocks* was a brilliant album produced while surfing a wave of narcotic celebration, the narcotic tsunami had broken on the band by the following year and coupled with constant touring they were all ‘Sick as a Dog’; Joe Perry later reminisced that he could how badly they had fragmented because the band were all using separate dealers by this point.  So by the time they had been sequestered away in a former convent in upstate New York, guns drugs and all, to record Draw the Line there were absolutely no fucks given … about anything.

I first bought Draw The Line back when I was 18, loved the first and last track, thought everything in the middle was a mess and sold it for cash a few years later.  In recent years I couldn’t find a decent enough second-hand copy so I bought a new one I saw cheap online which turned out to be a RSD 2013 re-release of 3000 copies**.  So it was interesting to slap the platter on the griddle and see what I made of it now.  [SPOILER ALERT: I love it].

Checkmate honey, beat ya at your own damn game
No dice honey, I’m livin’ on the Astral Plane

The ironically titled title track kicks it all off good and proper, you want a meaty slice of decadence marinated in a sauce of salty sleaze berries, served on a bed of shredded nerves and excess? course you do. Built around Joe Perry’s 6-string bass lick it is an excessively frenzied account of frenzied excess, the medium is the message.  Tyler’s screamed section after the (literal?) breakdown is one of my fave Aeronuggets.  Whatever do the lyrics mean?

An Indian summer, Carrie was all over the floor
She was a wet night winner, and rarely ever left the store
She’d sing and dance all night, and wrong all the right out of me
Oh, pass me the vial and cross your fingers, it don’t take time
Nowhere to draw the line

‘I Wanna Know Why’ is a great energised Stones-y rocker, with some great parping sax and barreling piano touches, I can barely make out a word Tyler slurs here, apart from the bits he steals from ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, but that’s not the point.  It just sounds chaotic and chemically concussed; brilliantly so.  The lyrics of ‘Critical Mass’ are a recounting of a dream producer Jack Douglas had – Tyler sang it because he hadn’t anything else completed and yet, somehow, magically it works, harmonica and all; probably because the groove the band locked into was so damn fine.

One of my very favourite tracks on Draw the Line is the Sex Pistols-inspired ‘Bright Light Fright’, a tune the band wouldn’t even do when Joe Perry presented it to them, so he sang it himself and the hurtling result would be worthy of any of the punk pretenders to the Aerothrone.  Stan Bronstein’s aggressive sax playing is just great, adding just the right element of chaos to it all.

All the surrounding discord and jagged edges make the stately, epic ‘Kings and Queens’ stand out wonderfully well, I was never a fan of the track when I first encountered it on their Greatest Hits collection, but heard in context you penny drops and the molecules hit the bloodstream.  Doubly so when the rather batty, sharp-edged rawwk of ‘The Hand That Feeds’ explodes out of the traps straight afterwards, Tyler deploying his full armoury of yelps and squawks and the extended guitar coda is a thing of joy.  Again though the real stars right here are the Kramer/Hamilton rhythm section who keep it tight and right.

My very favourite track on Draw The Line is next, ladies and gentleman I give you, what I am a ‘Sight For Sore Eyes’.  Joe Perry had started the track with his friend David Johansen, who gets a co-writing credit here, along with Jack Douglas; did he write the line ‘Turnin’ in style, walk a mile for your titty’ one wonders?  I love every note of this beast, forget about being a rock band, Aerosmith have their shout for being one of the great 70’s funk bands right here.  The fact that the track doesn’t seem to quite fit together and the production is really up in the listener’s grill, to the point of being hostile, just makes everything even better – Joey Kramer’s drumming really is astonishing on this one.

The old Kokomo Arnold (via-Elvis) track ‘Milk Cow Blues’ closes Draw The Line brilliantly.  Boasting the cleanest production sound on the whole album, the band really take off for the hills here the guitar interplay of Perry and Whitfield is something to marvel at too.

So there you have it all, I just got a bit carried away.  I have come to really rate Draw The Line in its own right, not just as a collection of odds and sods, or a marker of when Aerosmith started to lose the plot.  It was a vast achievement for Jack Douglas to corral such a chaotic situation onto wax at all, to create something that was such a brilliant amalgam of all the band’s strengths, buttressed by a monumental fuck-you attitude knocks on the door of genius.

Draw the Line doesn’t need you to like it; listen to it or not, you choose – it’s too busy living on the Astral Plane.

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*one of my very favourite albums ever – one day I’ll be good enough to write about it properly.

**which ain’t very limited really is it? I reckon every household on my street has at least one copy, Gladys and Bert at #27 have at least two.

True rude story: a nameless friend of mine* had been doing a lot of driving and ‘parking’ with his girlfriend and like every muso bore amongst us had insisted that they listen to his music whilst so doing.  In the process he had left one of his precious homemade tapes in the car; possibly along with his virginity.  Anyway, the mother of the young lady concerned had been driving to work listening to the tape and despite being a parent and therefore by definition ancient beyond all reckoning^ rather dug the rock.  You can only imagine her surprise when she delved into the glove compartment to find out that from the scrawled legend on the spine of the tape that she had apparently been listening to an LP called Taste The Band’s Come by Deep Purple.  Rich My friend was never allowed around again.  All because an evil older brother had made a mucky joke when he taped it, which my anonymous chum had never even noticed.

The world around us hangs in doubt
You face a crime that we’ll hear about
To pay the cost would never be the same
Eternal lover you’re not to blame        (This Time Around)

I first heard Come Taste The Band in 1989, aged 17 when en route to camping in Scotland (it rained) we stayed at a friend of my parents house and instead of being remotely sociable I spent the evening frantically taping LPs, finishing at 3am with a fair amount of, in retrospect, utter crap but also West Bruce & Laing Why Dontcha, ZZ Top Rio Grande Mud and Come Taste the Band.  My LP copy is a 2015 reissue that I bought the same day as Draw The Line – what an awesome Bundle o’ Rock to hit my welcome mat on a single day.

You need a big hard rock opener on an album like this and Come Taste The Band delivers this in spades thanks to ‘Comin’ Home’ which is the best track here.  It needed to be when you think of the context of a band who had just shed their iconic lead banjo player^^, if the new boy didn’t come up with the goods on Side 1 Track 1 then a lot of folks may not have listened much longer.  Tommy Bolin aces it of course, but the band as a whole just sound so revved up and ready for action, it’s great – just listen to the track start; it sounds like a whole bunch of 70’s live LPs ending all at once.  The band really fire up and head for the hills, a tight but loosey-goosey swagger carries this tune all the way home – Glenn Hughes bass and Jon Lord’s organ being particularly prominent in the mix.  This is one of my fave Purple songs period.

The pace really doesn’t let up for a second as the band drop two more great rockers at our feet, ‘Lady Luck’ and ‘Gettin Tighter’, both of whom have a real (looks for synonym for ‘swagger’), umm, swagger about them.  I love this iteration of the band, they had such a great groove about them in the studio and the newer chaps seemed to be pulling ever better performances out of Paice and Lord.  Glenn Hughes’ vocals on ‘Gettin Tighter’ are just excellent, he just sells it so well – even the decidedly funky mid-song breakdown works; best of all though is Bolin’s playing, fast but with no spare notes at all.

Come Taste The Band delivers a good change of pace with ‘The Dealer’ a cautionary tale about drug peddlers not being very nice chaps.  It’s a good job that the band were so abstemious in their habits that I can’t sound our local Hypocrite Alarm here.  Again the weave of the instruments is great and it is so good that I can forgive the bit where Coverdale gets to sing, ‘If the bluebird plays the eagle / He finds his song will turn to stone‘ meaningfully; this would have totally ruined a lesser LP for me.  In fact, let’s face it a good deal of the lyrics here are total bollocks but that’s not what we’re here for.

I tend to snooze through the next couple of tracks and jolt awake in time for ‘Love Child’ which is played and sung like it was meant, which has a wildly out-of-place clavinet solo sticking out of its’ roof.  It works really well in a it-shouldn’t-at-all way – no wonder Blackmore had kittens, the Funk was on!

‘This Time Around’ is a real oddity in the Purple canon^*, a funky odyssey once described, unkindly, by me as what it would sound like if Stevie Wonder had been deaf instead of blind; I rather like it now.  Another lead vocal for Hughes, Jon Lord plays all the instruments on this one and the whole has a pleasingly classy feel to it – I can imagine it playing during a 1970’s keys-in-a-bowl swingers party, but that may just be me.  It even has a nifty elegiac Bolin-penned instrumental coda called ‘Owed To a ‘G'”.

I’ve changed my mind as to the best track on Come Taste The Band already this evening, it’s another Hughes vocal too ‘You Keep on Moving’.  The band sound weighty and epic on this cut, without ever straining for it, dignified even.  Basically it conjures up a vision of a troubled man drinking alone in a shadowy room contemplating, like, really profound shit.  One day I’ll use it to play over the pivotal scene in the highly-acclaimed movie I will direct about a dude who has a long dark night of the soul, before realizing something profound/cleaning up his act/bedding a wench/carrying out his mission/doing the ironing, I’ve got a couple of details I need to sort out yet.  It is a perfect exit track for a very good LP.

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I have liked this LP a long time now, even to the point of owning it on the forbidden format.  I think it’s one that either gets overlooked by the hardcore Purple people, or looked at as a novelty because of poor Tommy Bolin.  I would argue, forcefully if you push me, that Come Taste The Band is worth a lot more than that, as entertainingly of the time as the band’s facial hair, it is every bit as good as its more lauded predecessor and would supply a good few shots in my Top 20 Deep Purple songs ever.  It may be an acquired taste, but definitely one worth the trouble of acquiring, eh Rich?

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PS: No idea who these guys are but they clearly don’t know as much about the LP as I do.

*I have opted for this anonymous approach in order to completely protect Richard Davies’ identity from exposure on the internet.  1537: Integrity is my middle name**.

**sort of 15Integrity37.

^although probably a couple of years younger than I am at the time of writing.

^^some no-mark called Ritchie Blackmore.  He probably works part-time in a supermarket these days, maybe in Lute-on.

^*not to be confused with the purple cannon … that’s a whole different thang.

… which was how Lemmy often used to introduce the opener of Bomber at gigs, ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’.  It always tickles me, that.

I think of Bomber, Motörhead’s third LP as a bit of a fan’s choice.  When all the Motörhead I owned was a greatest hits I asked my metal uncle* which I should go for next and he told me to go for Bomber because ‘it isn’t half as good as Overkill, or Ace of Spades but is still twice as good in some ways’.  Crystal clear.  I sort of get what he means now, sort of.

Bomber with the exception of the head-rushing title track is a slower, more considered LP than its’ predecessor.  Far more of a dirty rock album than an out-and-out metallic attack, you can hear Lemmy and chums picking their punches for maximum hurt, rather than just charging all arms flailing.  I think some of Lemmy’s best lyrics are here.  Look no further than ‘Poison’, a rebuttal of folk telling Lemmy to cut out the excess, he throws it back at ’em telling them it’s just the life he’s chosen and then the last verse is defiant and poignant, not a sentiment the ‘head are very big on usually**:

My Father, he used to be a Preacher
Never taught me nothing but scorn
If I ever catch him on the street, yeah
I’ll make him wish he’d never been born because
He was Poison (poison)
And now he poisoned my life
Yeah, he was Poison (poison)
I wish my mother wasn’t his wife, no

The sins of the fathers and all that. I also like the tough man tales of ‘Lawman’ and ‘Sharpshooter’, but my real nasty favourite on Side 1 is ‘Sweet Revenge’, a horror story told straight from the mind of a murdering, torturous villain – ‘Hello victims!’; it’s precisely the sort of unhealthy deviance that all decent metalheads should take twice a day after food.

For my money the best track on Bomber is ‘Stone Dead Forever’^ which just beats out the speed freakery of the title track by dint of some brilliant musicianship from all three of the ‘headers, the bass growls like no-one else has ever quite managed and Philthy’s drums are predictably great, but this is such a showcase for Fast Eddie – he gets to riff and roll to his heart’s content before taking us home in style with some great melodic playing.  Fast Eddie, pressed by Lemmy (introduced on one live recording as ‘where his larynx was first aired to the public gaze’!), sung lead on ‘Step Down’ too, the track has much more of a Thin Lizzy vibe to it and really stands out because of it, again the playing of all the tres hombres is really something else.

I like penultimate track ‘Talking Head’ better than Lemmy does and the lyrics about propaganda and media stand muster today ‘Don’t be hypnotized by sugar-coated lies / Don’t switch it on today’, but it’s only ever going to be the lead up to ‘Bomber’.  By Crom, I love this track!  Anyone who doesn’t get off on the sheer pummeling speed of it should check their vital signs immediately – the fact that the chorus just repeats the phrase ‘It’s a bomber / It’s a bomber’ is just the icing on the cake.  Keep it simple – job done.

So overall a really great, classic Motörhead LP, the sound of a band carousing harder, getting more confident and even meaner, whilst trying out a few new tricks as well.  Plus you really have to love that LP cover too, just a mock-up of every Commando Comics story about the deadly skies I can ever remember reading.

Ironically it could have been even better too.  I have the Bomber single and the B-side^^ ‘Over The Top’ is a great raunchy, raw piece of rock ‘n roll that could easily have taken the place of ‘All The Aces’ or ‘Sharpshooter’ to make the LP even better.  Proof? from 2004, admittedly but still freaking great^*

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PS. I originally wanted to review this as a tribute to Lemmy straight after his death.  I was prevented by good taste as bombing followed bombing.  Nice world we’ve made.

*so-called because he is made entirely of zinc-plated cadmium.  True story.

**’1916′ excepted.

^and one of my fave Motörhead tracks period.

^^included on most of yon fancy CD reissues.

^*Christ Mikkey Dee hits hard.

Maybe as part of my ongoing mid-life crisis I am having a full on (Kevin’s mom) grunge revival at the moment and you’re all invited.

Here’s an LP I wish I liked better than I do, Soundgarden Louder Than Love.  Their first LP on a major label and a bit of a transitional record on their way to Rock Valhalla which they reached two years later on 1991’s Badmotorfinger.  In no way is it a bad album, it has got a few great tracks on it, but it isn’t any better than their last indie release Ultramega OK at all.

As a positive sort of chap let’s concentrate on the best bits:

• Loud Love – My favourite Soundgarden song.  From the Zepped-up intro onwards the band generate a real sense of power and majesty on this beastie, by keeping everything really simple and, umm, loud.
• Full On Kevin’s Mom – Just the title really, some bands have 35 year careers and don’t coin one as good.  Shame the song is a bit average.
• Gun – Slinky, low and menacing, this is another powerful track, where the band do some clever sodding about with tempos.
• Big Dumb Sex – I was never going to be able to resist that chorus, was I? it’s also the one track where the band sound like they’re having fun.
• Full On (Reprise) – Musically so much better and more interesting than the original.
• Chris Cornell’s torso on the LP cover*.

Unfortunately most of the rest of Louder Than Love is just a jumble of ideas and tempos without enough cohesiveness in terms of the production (Terry Date) or song writing to see it through.  One of Soundgarden’s biggest strengths, Cornell’s fantastic voice, is just neutered here – whether not recorded right, or whether it is just that he learned how to sing better in the studio later on, I’m not sure; he often sounds like a slightly strangulated Ian Astbury**.  Overall, the production is far too middling – not enough low-end or up-top dynamics to lend the songs a bit of a helping hand, or give them enough distinction.

I wonder if Louder Than Love is the sound of a band being caught between two camps, ‘alternative rock’*^ and metal and being a bit inhibited by it; not having worked out that they could stick to their guns and conquer the world on their own terms.  For me Matt cameron is the standout musical performer, as always on any album he drums on, showing off all his fluidity and groove where he can.

I’ve owned Louder Than Love for about 7 years now, but if I had been hip enough to have cottoned onto it back in 1989 there is no way that I would have predicted what (and how great) Soundgarden were going to become – which is probably exactly why I’m a desk jockey, rather than a disc one.

That’s all, now gimme some more loud love.

786 Down.

PS: For the uninitiated, here’s the chorus of ‘Big Dumb Sex’, a parody of sex-obsessed glam rock.  Turn it up next time you’re cruising in your mum’s car, for maximum teen rebel thrills:

Hey I know what to do
I’m gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you
Fuck you
Ya I know what to do
I’m gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you
Fuck you I’m gonna

PPS: Lordy this is a cool video.

*as voted for by Mrs 1537, who was a big fan.

**in fact the, brilliantly titled ‘Get On the Snake’ is a dead ringer for a particularly energised Cult track; no bad thing.

*^as it used to be called way back then in 1989sville.

Maybe I am just a suspicious dude, as John Lennon sang, but I cannot help thinking sometimes that some rockers out there have not been living entirely spotless, exemplary lives.  I know, I know but just hear me out, okay?  I think that some of these so-called stoner rock bands have begun to hide subtle drug references within their music.  Now I know that this revelation may just blow apart the whole world of rock, but you’re all adults and so I would like you to judge for yourselves.  With that in mind I will paste the lyrics to a natty little record I picked up earlier this year, Sleep The Clarity.

From the temple stone
Smokes the lambsbread
Through dream, sleep and in waking.

Toward the weed fields
To That which holds the worlds
Walks the Sinsemillian.

Refutes death
Remains stoned constantly
The dealer breaks the eclipse.

Backpatch.
All are stoned thereafter.

Stoned chariot ascending
Smokes the true believer.

Life complete
The dealer is my refuge.

Heavy dry weight
Hasheeshian smoked relief.

Backpatch.
Iomnic life complete.

So, is it just me, or do you think Sleep are actively extolling the non-medical usage of mary-jhu-awnaa?  Much more of this and I’ll have to dust off my old copy of Dopesmoker and see if I can find any subliminal pro-weed messages in there too.

I was very excited to see The Clarity on the wall in my beloved probe Records in Liverpool and bought it despite the guys there warning me about the price*.  After all this was a new track from a group I love unreservedly and who had not released anything ‘new’ since 2003 and that, Dopesmoker, was a full release of something they had completed way back in 1993.  It is almost as though something was slowing them down, or chilling them out so they could only move at a truly glacial speed; wish I could work out what that was**.

The Clarity is a one song 12″, single-sided and etched on the reverse with a rather nifty image of, what I can only assume is, a hashtronaut drifting around a lunar landscape, geodesic domes and a lunar rover type vehicle in the background.  The lettering on the PVC cover is glow-in-the-dark, just to space me out even further – except I can’t get it to work, maybe I’m expecting results too quickly and I need to slow down to the band’s speed.

So far, so cosmic but what about the tuneage here?  ‘The Clarity’ is, by Sleep’s admittedly leisurely standards, a bit of a flash.  Within 30 seconds we’re launched into the main riff and the vocal – Dopesmoker took about a week to get to that point, 12″ singles clearly agree with Sleep.  ‘The Clarity’ is a perfect slice of doomy stoner metal, the guitar tone that Matt Pike conjures up just gives me goosebumps.

The playing of bassist Al Cisneros and the drumming of, comparatively, new boy Jason Roeder (ex-Neurosis) are wonderfully, powerfully primitive.  Add in some great dynamics (there’s a thrilling ‘drop out’ bit), plus stir in Pike’s vocals which sound so disembodied and stoned immaculate that they have clearly been ‘phoned in from the Astral Plane, together with a guitar solo that caused me to break out my air guitar whilst driving to the station the other day*^ and the whole concoction could have been created in a lab specifically to flip all my switches.

Also Sleep score BIG 1537 bonus points for coining the word ‘Iomnic’, which is defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary as:

Plus they also get additional 1537 bonus points for mentioning backpatches twice, surely the most important part of any denim jacket/vest? and thus the crucial part of any gentleman’s outfit.

So there we have it, a great 9-minute slice of stoner brilliance.  It won’t convert anyone to the stoner rock cause, but for those of us who are already there it’s balm for our souls.  But having now cracked the subliminal drug references on The Clarity, your intrepid reporter is off to investigate something called ‘reggae’ because I heard that if you play Peter Tosh Legalize It backwards there’s a reference to some sort of drugs; will I ever be able to rest?

788 Down(er).

*Southern Lord releases always cost so much, but they are always quality objects too.  The collector in me will also say that they tend to rise in price substantially down the years.

**in fact the single was, I now know, originally released as part of Adult Swim’s singles club in 2014.  Ah well, only 3 years behind.

*^not recommended, it makes steering really difficult, especially if headbanging too; who knew?!

Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)
Now honey please (now honey please)      (Love U Til I Don’t)

Greetings From Shitsville readers! Come in, make yourselves at home, nod hello to Mick Ronson and enter the wonderful world of the Wildhearts, easily the coolest eight-legged hairy baseball-booted rock thing in 1993.  Seekers of objectivity, just jog on – there’s none of that hereabouts.  I loved this band and I’m not afraid to shout and get physical about it if I need to.

Now secure all loose objects in your vicinity, gently usher pets and small children out of the room and play this:

If that doesn’t get right to you, report to the nearest undertaker for burial.  That’s the pure essence of Wildhearts right there veering, umm, wildly between close poppy harmonies, a touch of reggae and some serious thrash crunching at the end.  Nobody else sounds, or has ever sounded, like this.  In one sweet 5:08 blast the Wildhearts just lay everything else to waste.  The playing is just immense.  Sadly we here on planet Earth never deserved a band this good hence, I guess, the title of their debut LP Earth Vs. The Wildhearts*.

This is where I got in on the act, cash flow problems** meant I was never able to get hold of the band’s earliest few 12″s but I grabbed Earth Vs. The Wildhearts the day it was released in late ’93.  For my coin I got what is, I think, by far the best British hard rock LP of the last 24 years.  The band’s membership was always wildly unstable but by the time of the LP release it had crystallized into main man Ginger, guitarist CJ, bassist Danny McCormack and drummer Stidi.  They were all damn fine, hard-hitting musicians and display some serious muscle on the album, but never at the expense of a good melody.

Too good to be true? consider the evidence.

Opener, ‘Greetings From Shitsville’ with its skewering of life in the cheap end of London ‘The paper’s hanging off the walls / There’s ‘roaches dancing in the halls’, but the real joy is the sinuous swing of the track and (it will be a recurring theme this) the marriage of easy harmonies and a great tune with some real rock grit.  Plus I share Ginger’s jaded view of our nation’s great capital.  Then slide straight into the hard bopping ‘TV Tan’, Ginger firing off more inspired melodies and tunes across the course of this tune than certain bands manage throughout their careers.  True story.

The big reference point that always gets wheeled out for the Wildhearts are Cheap Trick^ and, yeah, their way with a harmony and a tune definitely bear a close comparison at times but Wildhearts were far more of a nastier, punkier proposition – I certainly wouldn’t have left them unsupervised around the cupboard I keep the cleaning products in.  You can hear a certain post-grunge sadness in the mix too, sometimes just after a great swooping chorus and a thrashed out punk riff – try ‘Everlone’ for size, there is even a perfect Iron Maiden guitar coda in there too.  The only band as hyperkinetic and joyously ADHD as the Wildhearts that I can think of were the Minutemen; I can think of no higher praise.

The more I listen to Earth Vs. The Wildhearts the angrier I get that they don’t all live in solid platinum mansions on the moon, eating diamonds and unicorn on toast.  Take ‘Loveshit’, one of the lesser lights on the LP, it would have made a lesser band trillions – IT HAS EVERYTHING! Elegiac guitar solos, thrusting boogie rock, some talkie bits, a divine chorus and Mutt Lange’s ex-wife on backing vox.

Some more highlights for you:

• The Miles Away Girl:  Sometimes one of my fave rock songs ever, tonight my third fave song on the LP.  Perfect harmonies and a lovely, romantic story.
• Suckerpunch:  Motörhead but heavier with better harmonies.  No, really. Like, really, really.  Trust me.
• News Of The World: (trot out tired old ‘Cheap Trick in a blender with Guns ‘N Roses and Megadeth’ comparison for the third time in the same post).

Special mention also has to go to, the awesomely titled ‘My Baby is a Headfuck’^^ which features Mick Ronson’s last recorded performance on one of the three guitar solos, that light it up … along with a sublimely groovy, rock ‘n roll groove and chants of ‘Headfuck, headfuck, headfuck!‘.  They just don’t make ’em like this anymore.

Sadly for the cultural history of our species the Wildhearts were a highly unstable concoction, the very hyperactivity and commitment that made all this possible, combined with an enthusiastic appetite for all manner of alcho-chemical excesses, record company squabbles and some mental health issues, all served to conjure centrifugal forces that tore the line-up apart.  The Wildhearts made a number of great LPs over a number of years, but never quite lined up all the elements again as powerfully as they did on Earth Vs. The Wildhearts.

Being an obsessive type of chap I bought a couple of singles from the album too.  TV EP was the first one, how awesome is that cover art?!

It featured the excellent hyper ‘TV Tan’ and three new tracks.  The creative engine burned so bright right then that every single time they had an hour of studio time they must have returned with 6 new tracks^*.  For my money the best track here is the moody ‘Dangerlust’, where Ginger and CJ take us on home with a huge slice of style with some great, elegant guitaring.  ‘Show A Little Emotion’ is fine, choruses to die for and all that, it even goes a bit Rocky Horror Picture Show at one point, but just lacks a little heft.  On the other hand ‘Down on London’ bristles with intent and is a cynical sideswipe at the rock scene, all about not being used by your illusions.

Suckerpunch is 29.74% sexier than most singles simply by being a 10″ single in the first place, with 4 tracks on one side and a big logo etching on the other – that’s just how people rolled way back in 1994.  The three B-sides here are easily amongst the best tracks this band ever laid down.  The quality is unrelentingly, bewilderingly great.

First off the saxxy ‘Beautiful Thing You’, is a truly wonderful pop rocker which would have been the absolute highlight of a lesser band’s career – there is some serious channelling of Bowie going on here and Ginger’s best vocal harmonies too – great sax by Steve Hamilton*^.  ‘Two-Way Idiot Mirror’ is another hook laden monster, the superlatives well is starting to run a little dry here.  Best of all is ’29 x The Pain’, a fanboy homage to all Ginger’s manifold musical influences and a real Wildhearts fan favourite too – name dropping all manner of 1537 faves like Starz, Big Black, Stiff Little Fingers et. al

Here sitting in my room
With the Replacements and Hüsker Dü
Like a rebel without a clue
And the Beatles and the Stones
Get to hang out with Ramones

There is also an extra extra bonus track too ‘The Duck Song’. It’s very serious.  Here are the lyrics in full:

Be kind to your web-footed friends
’cause that duck might be somebody’s mommy
They live in the rivers and swamps
Where the weather is always damp
Well you may think that this is the end
Well it is

Did I ever tell you how much I love the Wildhearts?

793 Down.

PS: Ginger attempted suicide last month, I understand not for the first time.  I send him much love and admiration, hoping he can find some equilibrium from somewhere.  There aren’t enough Ginger’s in this world and we very much need to hold onto the ones we have.

PPS: Eat it up.

*SPOILER ALERT: Very sadly the Earth won.

**curse you eating and drinking! Damn you Abraham Maslow!!  (shakes fist)

^I only started exploring CT because Ginger kept banging on about Dream Police in interviews.  I owe him that.

^^normally worth huge bonus 1537 points, but the Wildhearts don’t need ’em.

^*Ginger remains peerlessly productive and creative to this day.

*^the man who makes the often sought connection between Tina Turner’s ‘Simply The Best’ and Kid A.  True story.

Now I’m not one of those obsessed types of fellas who has to buy an LP wherever he goes, no matter the reason for, or location of, his visit, I’d just like you to understand that.  That’s not me.  At all.  I would just like to confirm once and for all I am not one of those record collecting weirdoes.

So, anyway, there I was in Chester for the sole purpose of buying Mrs 1537 a birthday card when I found myself wandering down towards the station and Grey & Pink Records, which I probably haven’t visited for a decade.  Big mistake that; the not visiting, not the visit today – that was a good thing, made even better by some very friendly service too.

After a quick 40 minute shuffle I found myself at the end of the shop with way more LPs than I should buy, so after 10 minutes of vicious deliberation I reluctantly put Uriah Heep Salisbury, Ian Hunter’s 1st LP, Roxy Music Manifesto and Joe Jackson Look Sharp! back in the racks for next time and took myself off to the counter.  So here is what I did buy:

Black Sabbath: Eternal Idol

Not one I see around very much, the cover isn’t in the best condition but I wanted this to plug a gap.  Plus you can see a nipple on the cover, which is top value for money in my book.  After spending an exhaustive 8 minutes skimming through the tracks I can confidently say I like it, ‘Born to Lose’ particularly.  I also love the story about the cover, that they couldn’t get permission to photograph the Rodin statue and so posed two models, covered them in bronze paint that they subsequently found was so toxic that it hospitalized them – now that’s rock and roll; poor sods.

Sparks: Young Girls and Beat The Clock

A band that I’ve always wanted to get into, but never quite got around to.  I picked up these two 12″s from around 1980 to start my collection, because they were produced by the awesome Giorgio Moroder, Beat the Clock is on a very nifty blue vinyl/picture disc combo and the model is showing off her Gossard Glossies bra on the back cover*.  I love these already, they’re ultra smart and sarcastic pop.  I firmly predict these won’t be my last Sparks purchases.

The Obsessed: The Obsessed

I was astonished to see this beauty on the wall of the shop for a very reasonable price.  I have wanted to get to grips with these terrifying metal ogres for years and years now**.  They look the types who’d snort their dead granny’s ashes off a tombstone in the woods at midnight as a prelude to a blood-soaked moonshine-fuelled rampage … just for something to do on a Tuesday.  My copy is a bit dusty but otherwise in absolute mint condition, still in the original polythene, a real snip at £20. I suspect I’ll be getting a lot of evil fun from this one.

Also picked up this week, equally accidentally:

MC5: Kick Out The Jams

I love picture discs, I remember loving at least half of this LP and I had to give my dad’s copy back to him a couple of years ago.  My friend’s band, whose bassist was called James once covered the title track as ‘Kick Out The James’, it might have been funnier if you were actually there, but I laughed so hard I almost had an accident.  True story.

Spacemen 3: For All The Fucked Up Children Of The World We Give You Spacemen 3

Yet another RSD 2017 release picked up for less than it was being sold for on the day – has that bubble burst folks? I’ve wanted an ‘in’ on Spacemen 3 for years now, this is their first ever recording session, used as a demo tape by them and it really is intriguing, surprisingly bluesy as well as boasting some wild psychedelic guitaring by Sonic Boom (credited as ‘The Mainliner’ here).  Bear in mind this band gave the world one of my favourite ever^ LP titles Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To.

Oh and for those of you worried about my long-term survival, I remembered to buy a birthday card too.  Now I suppose I have to listen to it all.

799 Down (still)

*as identified by Mrs 1537.  I bow to her superior bra recognition skills.

**okay, okay it was only really 3 days ago when HMO posted about them.

^and, in this band’s case, most accurate.

Endless Boogie is a vanity band … The Endless Boogie band was to be fronted by Paul Major, our guiding light and guru in the quest for strange recorded music.  Paul was unique, a superior advanced species.

So sayeth Jesper Eklow guitarist in one of my very favourite bands (you guessed it!) Endless Boogie.  But he sayeth it in a great new book I bought recently Feel the Music: The Psychedelic Worlds of Paul Major (2017), which is a part biography of Mr Major, part selection of some of the rarest psychedelic records in the world and part insight into rare record collecting.  Paul Major a native of St. Louis stared to surf for records in ’67, aged 13 and was immediately drawn to the oddments, the major label failures and he had a real revelation when he started to happen across his first few private pressings – this became the mother lode for his psychedelic journey and his career. To cut a long story short he freaked his way to NYC, worked in the Village Oldies record shop* and started to deal records in a major way, producing his Sound Affects and Feel The Music mailing lists** for weird music.

The book is a great, colourful read, the catalogues themselves are interesting as hell and I love his galleries of favourite/rarest/best deal albums where he casually drops comments like ‘one of only 2 known copies of this LP’, tells stories of how he used to see boxes of certain legendarily scarce albums just lying around and tales of a millionaire collector in Texas who has constructed a hurricane-proof bunker to keep his rarest records in – these are not things you’re going to pick up in HMV.  It was a pricey book, but if you’re a weirdo collector, interested in psych, Endless Boogie etc then I commend this book to you.  To sweeten the deal it also houses an exclusive 7″ with it with Major’s first band The Sorcerers on one side and a 5-minute Endless Boogie jam, ‘Acknowledgements’, on the other.

Which brings us onto that vanity band’s 2017 release Vibe Killer.  This is their first not to be a double LP and I think the band’s sound benefits from that slight compression, as a previous reviewer somewhere I read pointed out the Boogie wasn’t a problem, but the Endless was starting to be.  They were a band who had taken the term ‘long player’ very much to heart, an endemic problem for jam bands of any stripe.  I mean I liked Long Island enough to make it the #1 LP in 2013’s Top 8 but 4 years on I don’t play it very often because it’s just too loooong (Island).

Opener ‘Vibe Killer’ is great.  A slow loping, menacing track (‘I am your vibe killer / You’re done / This will end’) the band set the controls for the horizon, propelling themselves there with the sort of unfussily potent guitar soloing that always brings me to my knees.  Everything breaks down and gets a touch psychotic for a while and then Endless Boogie drive it on home in a squall of feedbacking fuzz.  Clocking in at 3:45 ‘Let it be Unknown’ with its’ bizarre ‘Give me a nickle and I’ll show you Don Rickles’ refrain, is the shortest EB song I know and maybe because of this comes over as  abit inconsequential in this company.

By far the most disturbing track on Vibe Killer is the, brilliantly titled ‘High Drag, Hard Doin” with lyrics that sound, to me, like a drug deal/unrefined hedonism gone very badly wrong.  The music is just awesome again though, diamond hard boogie, just the right side of sloppy and again with simply the best guitar solo I’ve heard … since the previous one on this LP.

Endless Boogie get da funk good style on Side 2 opener ‘Bishops at Large’ and it’s a really interesting diversion from their usual sound too.  I’m not sure who the keys player is on this one but he does a damnably good job of it in a rolling and tumbling Stax kind of way.  It would be my favourite track on Vibe Killer if it wasn’t for a heady combo of a broken arm, KISS, a bad acid trip and kites …

‘Back in ’74’  has an appropriately harder rock groove than usual and Major sing/speaks clearly.  Major composed the lyrics after breaking his arm moving amps and told the tale of the last time he was ‘wounded’.  Back in 1974 KISS played a kite festival in Forest Park St. Louis, Major and some of his chums, who’d shaved off their eyebrows the night before in homage to David Bowie, dropped acid and went up front – only to be turned upon by the crowd at the end of the gig.  KISS didn’t bring their own kites.  This is a stone cold nugget of greatness and would justify the price of the album all by itself.

LP closer ‘Jefferson County’ is the only track that feels like a bit of a let down to me, it ambles on comparatively harmlessly, which just isn’t enough in this context.  CD buyers (boo!) get an extra track ‘Whilom’ and it’s a doozy, think Canned Heat in particularly cosmic mode stoned immaculate, slow though it is, it is still a tight track and would have swapped places with ‘Jefferson County’ if I’d have been in charge of things.  There are also two bonus tracks^, ‘Trash Dog’ which is an excellently jagged, uptight affair and ‘Warp, Weft & Pile’ which sounds like the Malian bastard boogie son of The Doors’ ‘The End’ and is thusly very highly recommendedarooni.

As a 7-year fan of Endless Boogie Vibe Killer leaves me happy, it isn’t just more of the same which, no matter how good, puts me off bands after a couple of LPs, it is a progression.  Vibe Killer takes what I love about the band for a long dusty ride out into some unfamiliar countryside and is all the better for the journey.  This vibe’s alive.

We make our way up to the stage, right up front and the acid’s kicking in.

800 Down.

PS: ‘Acknowledgements’ is okay, but a little shapeless – I include it here because there’s an actual video of the thing. Warning: contains gratuitous scenes of Paul Major smoking, a lot:

PPS:  Read about KISS at the kite festival here and about the genesis of the track here.

*subject to a great chapter, or two in the book and is a shop I have been to.

**both of which make for surprisingly good reading, certainly for the more obsessive amongst us.

^both of which and ‘Whilom’ are included on the download card for vinyl buyers of Vibe Killer, which is the sort of touch that wins my undying fandom.

Since nobody else appears in the whole, wide, WWworld seems to be arsed enough to transcribe the lyrics from the highlight of Endless Boogie Vibe Killer LP, I’ve done it so you don’t have to.  As the song is spoken, I have written it just as Paul Major speaks it:

Yeah, I might be wounded now but let me tell you about when I was really wounded.
It was in St Louis back in 1974, there was this kite flying contest, and a new band called KISS was going to play there
It turns out theatre students went with us and the night before they shaved off their eyebrows because of David Bowie.
We make our way up to the stage, right up front and the acid’s kicking in.
20,000 people here, 457 kites, KISS on stage at the kite festival.
KISS did not bring their own kites, they were kiteless, carefree.
It was either spring or fall.
Kiteless.

So they finished playing ‘Black Diamond’ and the music stopped and I looked around and everybody was pointing at me, girls were sticking out their tongues and a bottle flew and hit me in the head, somebody punched Wolf and this girl said ‘What’s with those dudes with no eyebrows?’
Yeah I saw KISS at a kite festival.
Webster College 1974.
I saw John Zorn put ice-cream into a trumpet but I saw KISS at a kite contest.
Brought to you by KSEH, St Louis’ Number 1 underground radio.
I didn’t have any kites of my own, I didn’t want anybody else’s kite either, I wanted to see KISS.

Listen, I’m wounded now so I cannot play guitar for you today but I was also wounded in 1974 when I saw KISS at a kite festival.  St Louis, Missouri. 

800 Down (still)

Take a look to the sky just before you die

I know, deep down in my head thingy, that Metallica have made technically better LPs than Ride The Lightning and it is not my fave LP of theirs* but I just love it deep down in my underpants**, there is just something fantastically endearing about it.  The band was still at that stage where they are discovering just how great they are/can be and you can hear the tension between their ambition butting up hard against their talent and their ability to get it down on wax.  The tension and joy that creates just illuminates Ride The Lightning like a bolt of, umm … exciting weather phenomenon.

As you might expect from an almost teenage band playing as fast and hard as they can whilst fuelled on Mexican food and Carlsberg, this is a gloriously teenage LP.  Kicking off, literally, with ‘Fight Fire With Fire’ Ride The Lightning never looks back once the acoustic intro was shunted out-of-the-way by the band’s heaviest song to date.  This is every single teenage tantrum you’ve ever had, or even heard of, fired through the patented 1537 Aggrotronic Enhancement Ray-o-phone and rumour has it, it can frighten parents at a distance of up to 3 miles.  My usual grandiloquence deserts me here, this is just fucking raging!

Soon to fill our lungs, the hot winds of death
The gods are laughing, so take your last breath

I have mixed feelings about the title track, the bass guitar intro is quite brilliant and the rhythm that the band lock into is just perfect but it overstays its’ welcome for me, they don’t quite have enough good ideas to fill the middle section^.  There’s just something about Hetfield’s vocal that doesn’t quite hit the mark and reminds me that they were actively trying to recruit John Bush as a singer at this point.

But fear not! My favourite ever Metallica track is up next, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’, which it would be even if it wasn’t based on one of my very favourite novelists’ novels.  It’s a track that just goes to prove, if it were ever in doubt, that there has never been a rock song that wasn’t enhanced at least 239.765% by the sound of a bell.  For the first time in their recorded history the band slowed down in order to deliver a harder, more concentrated blow and boy does it work.  I can just remember how great it sounded live the first time I saw them too, a total stand out.

Having shown us a new trick, they hit us with another one on ‘Fade To Black’ another track that is my favourite Metallica track ever^^, the band (gulp) use acoustics again and sing tunefully – have they no shame? the big sell outs!  The song is about contemplating suicide of course and the lyrics are sensitive and perceptive, rather than exploitative and the song builds sonically into an absolute tour de force.

Side 2 of Ride The Lightning starts weakly for me, ‘Trapped Under Ice’ is all treble and flash at a million miles an hour – in boxing terms it just doesn’t land a glove on me, ‘Escape’ is again lacking some bass heft and appears to have had a chorus grafted on from an entirely different track; let’s put it down as a youthful experiment.  So, half way through Side 2 and it’s looking dodgier than a game of dodge ball in Dodge City in a dodgem rink, what could possibly save us? Quick, whip out your Bibles guys!

The moshnificent ‘Creeping Death’ is definitely my all-time favourite Metallica song, the title is so great that it would possibly be my favourite even if the band hadn’t bothered recording anything to go with it.  It is also my favourite ever metal track dealing with the 10th plague on Egypt, the death of the first-born – I confess I was late to this realisation, thinking for a couple of years it was just about a big scary creeping monster that slew people arbitrarily – who knew Christianity could be so gnarly?  This is almost my favourite thrash song ever and the band’s playing here is just frighteningly tight and committed, the slowed down ‘Die by my hand’ section is just genre-defining stuff.

As no metal LP is complete without an instrumental homage to H.P Lovecraft, Ride the Lightning finishes with The Shadow Over Innsmouth^* inspired ‘The Call of Ktulu’.  Pretty darned good it is too, melodic and well-structured, it progresses just as an almost 9-minute instrumental needs to.

Ride the Lightning is a flawed bowl of cherries: some amazing moments here and a whole bunch of new tricks that show, even at this early stage, that Metallica were too powerful, clever and talented to be one trick thrash ponies and conversely*^ a few bits where the song-writing and production just wasn’t up to snuff yet.  Cliff Burton’s influence is particularly strong on this LP, pushing the band away from being too straight-forward.

This LP is pure essence of teenager, wound too tight, obsessed with death and horror, too loud, too fast, endearingly earnest at times and just plain over-excited, I love it for each and every one of those qualities.  Well that and Lars’ hilariously unconvincing tash, especially on his ‘scary man’ face on the back cover picture, bless.

801 Down.

PS. You know I’ve set up my blog so I don’t have to write about the same bands too often.  My last Metallica review? November 2012, my first ever LP review on 1537.  Maybe I’ll just cover ‘Tallica once every 800 records, or so.

PPS:  The best live version I could find – you’ll need to whack the volume up a bit though:

*Kill ‘Em All still wins by a country mile.

**pretty sure that’s where my heart is located.  Note to Self: Check medical textbook before publishing post.

^unlike me, whose middle section is amply filled.

^^alternate months, Tuesday through Thursdays.

^*my second favourite Lovecraft, after At The Mountains of Madness.

*^’conversely’ defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary as, ‘just like wearing Converse’.  True story.

Sometimes it can all be about taking a rest.

In 1990 King’s X were one of my very favourite bands, their first two LPs had burned right through me, they were so original, so different, so emotional compared to everything else that got labelled as rock and metal at the time, I’d written to them and they were nice, they had also played a couple of the best shows I’d ever seen.  Their second LP Gretchen Goes To Nebraska was just an all-timer for me.  So it’s fair to say that I was eagerly waiting for Faith Hope Love when it was released in October, literally, I had to wait for the record shop to open before buying it the day it came out.  And then …

Faith Hope Love just fell a bit flat for me, nothing on it stood out and grabbed me the way it had previously, there wasn’t enough heaviness for me at the time.  The closest was the bass-led ‘Moanjam’ which came on like an earthy faith-driven Motörhead, the rest of the album seemed like the band were concentrating more on their harmonies and melodies than their firepower – which was a shame because it was the fusing of the two that gave them such potency for me.

But let’s tour the best bits of the album.  The growling bass of ‘We Are Finding Who We Are’ gives onto a great choppy Electric Ladyland vibe, Doug Pinnock’s vocal really sells this track, polished and raw.  The single, ‘It’s Love’ has some great moments too, the harmonies are great and Ty Tabor plays a sky-scraping guitar solo in that strange tone he uses that could only ever be him*.  I like the sheer strangeness of ‘Mr Wilson’ which benefits from some genuinely odd turns and twists and backing vox from 1537-faves the Galactic Cowboys.  I’d state for the record that ‘Moanjam’ is still the best thing here by far, an act of worship that was felt not just thought out.

I struggle to find too much more on Faith Hope Love, especially on Side 2.  King’s X just sound a little uninspired on their third album in three years, a lot of the second side sounds like a retread of some of their best bits and some not fully realized ideas.  I find the band’s pro-Christian message much less subtle on this LP, hardly a surprise given the LP title taken from 1 Corinthians 13:13 (a beautiful passage, read at my wedding) and whilst I have no issue at all with whatever they believed then or now, I can’t help thinking that the band needed to concentrate a little more on how the message was being delivered here; especially if they were hoping to reach the heathen Welsh.

I had hoped that I would be in for a pleasant surprise revisiting Faith Hope Love, but my memories of it are pretty much what I still feel about it today, it is the album that broke the spell for me.  The musicianship is, as always, excellent and it does have its moments but this still remains the LP that showed us that King’s X might just be fallible and mortal like the rest of us^; play Gretchen… after listening to it and there simply isn’t any comparison, not a single track would have made it onto the earlier album.  I still saw them 3 times on the tour for the album, twice supporting AC/DC at Birmingham NEC and they were great even in that environment, best of all though was Manchester International II on 2 May 1991 (supported by Mind Funk) ‘Moanjam’ in particular was brilliant.

This is by no means a bad LP, but it suffers because King’s X were capable of so much better.  I would still love to hear what the band would have come out with if they had taken a break and had a little longer to put this LP together, maybe an amalgam of Faith Hope Love and the self-titled follow-up.  Whatever.  I’d definitely like to think that they would never have penned the immortal lyric, ‘Fluently, the parrot speaks six languages not known to man’, guys!

Look, just go and buy Gretchen Goes To Nebraska – play it, marvel, repeat.

803 Down.

PS:  All extracts are from The Mighty Scrapbooks of Rock! I actually kept a separate one for King’s X, that’s how much of a nerdy fan I was.  I may also have been ‘between girlfriends’ at the time (and not in the more exciting meaning of the phrase).

PPS:  God this is a video of its time, maybe just listen to it?

*One of my very favourite players, also the first famous dude to bump fists with me at a gig for which he will always be truly revered.

^your humble author excepted.

What a piece of work is a man 1537! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?    Hamlet (Act2: Scene II)

Well, Hambo my old bean, ‘Quintessence of Dust’ is the side long opening track of Transmaniacon Plays The Darkening Plain and a stone(r) cold slice of genius pie.  I picked this album up when it was released in 2014 because of the brilliant Ian Miller cover art and the fact it looked really damn heavy and I’ve never looked back.  The fact that it is on red-splatter vinyl and there are only 300 copies of it in existence on LP is just the geek boy icing on the spiky android cake.

You can have loads of genre bolting together related fun with Transmaniacon, as this is definitely the finest doom prog proto-metal punky sci-fi stoner rock LP I have ever owned, or indeed am likely ever to.  Not that any of that is remotely relevant to anything anyway, this is quite simply great music.  If there was any talent related justice these chaps would all be showing us around their platinum and diamond encrusted tropical mansions on MTV cribs every day of the week.

I have never read, or to my knowledge even glimpsed, John Shirley’s 1979 novel Transmaniacon but the music herein started life as a mooted soundtrack for an abandoned film of the book as all good doom prog proto-metal (etc etc) LPs should.  Transmaniacon opt for the tried-and-tested Iron Butterfly and Rush route of an epic on Side 1 and a clutch of other tracks on Side 2 and boy does it pay off.

The epic in question is ‘Quintessence Of Dust’ and my poor weak brain’s interpretation of the story is that of a diseased population being sent out into space to be disposed of and coming back as a half-human half-robo killer hybrid hellbent on extracting a bloody revenge for their travails.  I assume this is based on a true story.  Basically, your full-on future-ocalypse man-machine scenario and the pay off is that to defeat the monstrous we must become monsters ourselves, which I half-remember as a line from Nietzsche*.  It is, with a twist or two towards robots, close to the plot of my favourite disco holocaust LP Cerrone Supernature.  So much for the theoretical side of things, but does it rock?

Of course it does and not like anything else in the whole of the 1537.  The guitars storm, soar and rage, there is some quite frankly Jon Lord-esque organ passages and the vocals are really something else, there’s a great sneery, punker quality about them which I love.  As if all that wasn’t enough, Lydia Lunch makes an awesomely sinister appearance about a third of the way through, to great effect, as a dead-voiced narrator who intones lines like ‘shiny metals that never rust / Weak animals that must be crushed’. 

It is difficult to sum up a track like ‘Quintessence Of Dust’ because of the sheer unwieldy size of it, both in terms of length and sheer ambition.  The fact that the tension and excellence of the track is sustained throughout is testimony to just how great this is.  Monster will do.

The musicianship Transmaniacon display on The Darkening Plain is top-notch.  Bassist Steve Cox’s keyboards really grab my attention as do Simon Halliday’s vocals, which take the sound far further towards Killing Joke than Queensrÿche.  Paul Cox and Ged Murphy’s guitars chug and lash hard, as and when required.  On top, or beneath, all that Karl Hussey’s drumming is a versatile energetic thing that glues and propels things together/onwards.  Phew!

But can Transmaniacon avoid the old trap of the epic first side so hugely outweighing the second that it is, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant and unmemorable? Fear not gentle reader, they do.

The three tracks that make up side 2 of The Darkening Plain whilst not conceptually linked, albeit sharing a pessimistic outlook (‘The oppressive weight of expectation/ Sordid reality of homo-sapien’**), are not much of a departure in sound for the band.

The pick of the three for me is ‘An Eye For An Eye’ which is a genuinely angry cut which jogs along at a great chugging pace and is graced with yet more great organ work from Steve Cox – it sounds like a furious Deep Purple; which can only be a good thing.

I cannot find anything else by the band online, or even anything about them after The Darkening Plain.  I suspect that this LP may well prove to be one of those tantalising single-shot affairs where something really great just coalesces out of the aether and then, just as mysteriously dissipates leaving us standing alone and energised on The Darkening Plain. 

806 Down.

*Friedrich, not Jack.

**when I was reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind earlier this year the eMail filter at work took offence at the ‘homo’ in ‘homosapien’ and assumed I was bandying around homophobic insults.  I may write an angry concept LP about it.

My favourite member of the best rock band there has ever been died today.

Back in Black.

Oh yes! Time to dance those January blues away folks! Time to cue up something that really rocks and, much more importantly, rolls!  Time to cue up ZZ Top Fandango! then.  Oh yes!

Fandango! was where me and all my friends went exploring once we had fallen so hard for Eliminator, because it was always the cheapest one for sale on cassette.  A half live, half studio, full party time LP that the band released in 1975 when they were flying high with the success of Tres Hombres, this little beastie just doesn’t seem to get the love supreme.  This is full on ZZ nearing the very Top, as far as I’m concerned, capturing the band at an honest, early stage, before the gimmicks and too much daftness became the order of the day* and you’re getting a kick-ass rock and roll band right up in your grill.

The live side ‘Captured as it came down – hot, spontaneous and presented to you honestly, without the assistance of studio gimmicks’ as it proudly proclaims, opens so damn well with ‘Thunderbird’.  A fast, hard kicking hymn to everybody’s favourite teen tipple it’s incredible – what a set opener! Billy Gibbons’ guitar is just so fast, in your face and perfect, the man is playing for all he’s worth on this one and he’s worth a funky king’s ransom.  Let’s face it who wouldn’t choose to get ‘hi-hi-high’ with them?**

Possibly the reason Fandango! loses some love is the cover of Jailhouse Rock’ that follows and segues into the ‘Backdoor Medley’, don’t get me wrong, it’s all pretty fierce and raucous and ZZ Top do sound like the best bar band there has ever been, but … I could just do without some of the great-if-you-were-there-more-boringer-if-you-weren’t sodding about on the section of ‘Mellow Down Easy’ they play.  It just lacks some brilliance.

The flip side however has got a couple of the best tracks they ever laid down.  Nothing sums up ZZ Top in their pomp better than ‘Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings’, how can something so powerful just be so damnably funky? I think it’s the same reason that nobody can ever cover them properly, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard were at once a diamond hard and incredibly groovy rhythm section, you play it without that looseness and touch then the whole sound goes.  It’s a great tale of being done wrong by your main squeeze, ‘but what in the world can a nasty dog do but try to get next to you?‘.

Next up is one of my very favourite ZZ Top tracks ‘Blue Jean Blues’ about finding your ex, umm, baby still wearing your jacket.  Out of all the slow blues they have ever laid down this is my favourite^, Billy Gibbons’ sings it like he really means it and his unfussy, very unhurried guitaring is just perfection – it is all about that feel; Tom Waits and Keith Richards were right about that.  It has to be said here too that Bill Ham’s production on the studio tracks is as brilliant as always, the sound he gets with everything crystal clear and warm

Then we veer towards the good time boogie of ‘Balinese’ about a casino/den of iniquity^* to the ethnosexual-politics-of-another-age-esque ‘Mexican Blackbird’*^, which are fine but definitely the lesser lights here.  Fandango! definitely rallies for a closing 1-2 kick though with ‘Heard It On The X’ and ‘Tush’ – the latter being the only song I have ever sung with a band and thus deserving of a place in the annals of rock history, preferably carved on a stone tablet.  The former is an homage to the border radio that inspired the ‘Top and is just full of jittery, kinetic percussion and ‘lots of watts’ just like the titular radio station, almost new wave eulogy to shortwave:

Do you remember
Back in nineteen sixty-six?
Country Jesus, hillbilly blues,
That’s where I learned my licks.

And do you really need a learned dissertation on ‘Tush’? it’s a hymn to ass, (im)pure and simple.  A measure of just how damn great and bouncy it is^^ is just how many times it has been ripped off by other bands – stand up Motörhead, ‘No Class’ indeed it’s virtually a cover version!

The best thing that can be said about Fandango! is that it puts a smile on my face every time I play it, more than that, it makes me want to move in mysterious ways my dancing to perform.  Just right for January.

827 Down.

PS: the second part of this is just the absolute dogs bollocks!

*gimmicks and daftness which drew me to them in the first place.  I’m a big dumb hypocrite, I’ve got great legs though; oh and I know how to use them.

**although the song fails to encapsulate the full Thunderbird experience as there isn’t an extra verse about waking up without your strides on in your friend’s house face down in your own cold sick; that happened to me when I was riding the Night Train way back when.

^I appreciate this is up against some stiff competition with ‘Sure Got Cold After The Rain Fell’ but it comes out on top by the width of a Rizla.

^*where they pick up 1537 bonus points for rhyming ‘skin-tight pants’ with ‘dance’ – always a favourite over here.

*^just don’t ask!

^^the tune, not the ass, or maybe there’s something very clever going on here and it’s both?

Music is a truly magical thing when you pause to consider it, the way it creates a fusion of melody and poetry is like nothing else; melding both together to create something even greater than either.  You do get to experience those rare moments of transcendent beauty every so often, something you play before waking as a better, wiser man, the morrow morn.  You need proof, mortal?  I call Lonely Kamel Shit City to the stand.

Do you want to get pissed?
Let’s go and get pissed.
At my favorite bar in town
I know you can’t resist.
Shit out of luck!
We’re shit out of luck!
The bars close way too soon!
Oh, man, we’re shit out of luck!

Shit city, shit city.
Shit city, shit city.

Who amongst who has lived, loved, laughed, laid and libated can fail to recognize those sentiments? although I am sure, like me, you have probably struggled to articulate your torment that well.  Better still Lonely Kamel come on like Motörhead desperate for a piss.  Then the song slows down and we get the noise of either

1.  Someone drinking a copious libation to the Gods
2.  The sound of a Norwegian stoner dude taking a lengthy slash against a wall
3.  A beautiful, tinkling mountain stream.

I’m going mostly 1 and 2 there for that one.  The Kamel* shift gear into a slower chugging but still angry mood for the rest of the song.  It rocks ass.

Do you wanna get high?
Now, do you wanna get high?
Everyone is high all the time
And no one will deny.
Do you wanna get stoned?
Come on and get stoned
We all know a place to go
Oh, God, I wanna get stoned

Shit City may actually be my favourite Norwegian stoner metal LP of 2014 and I caution you, that is not an accolade that I care to throw around lightly in these parts.  The fact that I snagged one of a blue vinyl edition of 100 is, I admit, also a factor in my joy here.  That I bought this because of the sweary title and the silly band name** and it turned out so well is just the icing on the Kamel cake for me.

You want groovy titles? they have groovy titles, my fave being ‘Seal The Perimeter’ and ‘I Feel Sick’.

You want photos of a bunch of stoned Norwegian dudes clowning around in a city square? of course you do, why wouldn’t you?! Check out the gatefold.

You want a great, galloping cover of a song from a terrifically obscure British rock band? they cover ‘Nightjar’ by Necromandus, it is incredibly good too – hard rocking and nimble, just the way I like my proto-metal cover tunes.

You want a 7-minute classic rock tune?  check out ‘Falling Down’, which marries that dependable stoner chug with a good chorus and a very good vocal performance from Thomas Brenna.

Which is about all it offers^ and I mean that in a good way.  If you like good stoner rock, with occasional flashes of aggro around the fringes then Lonely Kamel are your men, if not then there’s nothing here to persuade the floating voter.  I have no doubt at all that Shit City would sound great being pumped out of a tricked-out van’s speaker system under a field of stars, which is the point of everything isn’t it?

Now let’s get pissed.

829 Down.

*as we die-hard Kameltoenians call them.

**are there many Kamels, socially unfulfilled or otherwise, sweeping majestically across the plains of Norway?

^I’m ignoring the track ‘BFD’, which stands for ‘Big Fat Dolly’ and is a bit odd, albeit in a funky ZZ Top kinda way; it just doesn’t really fit here for me.

So, 42 days in, how many records from 2018 have you bought already?  I have four, a rate that I calculate if maintained will mean I hoover up approximately 2,940.48 new LPs from 2018 this year*.  What could possibly have caught your eye already, Master? I hear you call.  Well, I’m very pleased you asked me that:

Starcrawler

What a bloody great album!  A 28-minute long hard rocking, scuzzy, punky, bubble-gum explosion; think Black Sabbath (circa Sabotage) meets the Rezillos.  Some great songs (one of them very rude), an excellent 17 year-old guitarist, Henri Cash, a brilliant front woman who spits blood live, very good production by Ryan Adams and white vinyl – all adds up to a whole hell of brilliance.

The Limiñanas:  Shadow People.

I had no idea this was coming out,  just stumbled across it in the mighty Probe Records when I needed cheering up.  I’m only on two spins but I have to say that the follow-up to the 1537 #1 LP of 2016 , hasn’t grabbed me hard so far.  Plenty of cool slathered all over this disque but the songs don’t seem quite as strong this time around the sun.

Moon Duo: Jukebox Babe/No Fun.

Picked up quite cheaply after I saw them the other week, I’m still not convinced by their version of the Stooges classic but they do Alan Vega damn well; I’ve had that track on repeat for days.  The fact this beastie has a great cover, is very limited and is on white vinyl only adds to its’ allure.

Fu Manchu:  Clone Of The Universe.

Only came yesterday on a blue/black smoky vinyl and because my parents were staying with us to celebrate my dad’s 70th, which rather selfishly, was this weekend I’ve only had the chance to blast this once.  The side long barn burner ‘Il Mostro Atomico’ is quite something and would be even if Alex Lifeson wasn’t adding his talents to it.  My favourite so far is the heavy as a planet title track.  Great stuff.

I have also taken the opportunity to pick up a few LPs that I read about, often for the first time ever, in your various end of year lists.  We all love the indulgence of producing these lists but for my part I do find them useful and I certainly have picked up some great recommendations from them over the years.  This time around I have fully activated metal mode and snagged:

Powertrip: Nightmare Logic.   An incredible thrash metal attack released on one of my favourite record labels.  I sincerely doubt that I will hear another new track as good as ‘The Executioner’s Tax (Swing Of The Axe)’ this year.  Power! A gazillionfold better than anything any of the Big 4 thrashers have released in years.  The fact I have a liking for clear vinyl bordering on sexual may also be relevant here.

Midnight:  Sweet Death & Ecstasy.   I am so scared by this festering nugget of filth that I haven’t dared to play it yet.  True story.  It haunts my sleep and I have contemplated isolating it between two gospel LPs I have to try and neutralize its’ evil vibes.

Necromancers: Servants Of The Salem Girl.

What a great find! Really classy classic doomy old-school rock, atmospheric and evocative too.  I broke the trusty old air guitar out a couple of times too.  Definitely an LP that will sound twice as good listened to by candlelight, I intend to conduct that experiment next week.

So thank you one and all for the suggestions, plenty more have been added to my want lists too.  And now, if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment with the executioner.

830 Down (still).

PS: a clue to where I’m going next.  I stumbled across this yesterday, it was clearly an omen.

*note to self: check maths before publishing.

I once knew a guy called SikFuk.  I could tell his name was SikFuk because he had it prominently tattooed on his forearm, both his forearms in fact, now I come to think about it.  He had looong greasy brown hair, a 1000 yard stare and a manic laugh that just chilled me to the bone whenever I heard it erupt.  His real name was Charles, which kinda spoils the story a bit so we’ll ignore that part.  I never asked him how he got his name because I never ever wanted to know,  but he did sport a big belt buckle onto which someone (him?) had scratched and painted ‘Ex-con’.

Charles comes to mind because when I look at the front cover of R.I.P Street Reaper, he’d have fitted right in – probably into the back seat between the dude sitting with his belly out proudly and the guy in the sparkly band tee.  Add in the poncho fella and the mean critter in the driving seat and that’s all you need to know about the crew behind probably my favourite metal LP of 2017*.  Buncha SikFuks.

I picked up on Street Reaper via the mighty Doom Charts blog and immediately blew my wad on the 180g white vinyl, with a poster edition of 400; but that’s just how I get my jollies these days.  Oh my, imagine my excitement when it arrived.  Forget about the great photos even, just get a load of the song titles!

What more do you need to know?**

Street Reaper just sounds electric to me.  Every note, every yelp, every beat is so completely wired, distorted and overdriven it’s a charm.  There is something deeply sickly about the treble-charged thrills on offer here, but it moves me to bang my head like no other LP I’ve played in a long time.  The overall effect is like Street Reaper was recorded on a 4 track recorder back in ’89 and the LP was cut from a 9th generation taped copy; in a fucking great way!  Just listen to the riff on the opener ‘Unmarked Grave’, it’s just filthy and unhealthy, played on grave-rusted strings.  I can guarantee that no vitamins were consumed at all during the making of this LP, plenty of supermarket own-brand cleaning products, but definitely no vitamins.  I mean, look at them!  The cover photoshoot has to be the first time that Fuzz, Angel M, Willie D and Jon Mullett^ had seen daylight since 1996.

To R.I.P off a quote from Kill ‘Em All, bang the head doesn’t bang to Street Reaper, especially the epic majesty of ‘Mother Road’.  For my money this is the best in show here a desert rock epic accidentally played at 45RPM , a relentless fuzzed-up (ahem) driving riff, a song to blast from your car as you outrun the zombie hordes overrunning civilization, your latest skanky squeeze literally riding shotgun next to you, drinking moonshine; ‘I feel the hand of doom behind me / Need speed I need white lines / Sitting down is doing time / No stop sign in my mind’.  Yeah!

It is relentless and brilliant from start to finish, there are even a few touches of Iron Maiden and Armoured Saint here and there, imagine the first Maiden LP if all the band had been Paul Di’Anno-s, that’s what we’re dealing with right now.  It is an immutable law of nature that everything sounds 28.54% better on white vinyl, but even without that boost Street Reaper just rocks.  I have no criticisms.

R.I.P may not have quite brought the fetid corpse of heavy metal back to life, but rest assured they have done something unutterably vile to its’ dead body that has left it pretty gooey.

832 Down.

*although not appearing on my best of since I only picked it up in November.

**that’s one of them rhetorical questions that ladies deploy during arguments.

^all of which I have no doubt are aliases adopted to confuse their parole officers back in Portland, OR.