The Hellacopters - Overdriver (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 31 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Wikipedia | YouTube

This ninth album from the Hellacopters runs forty minutes, hardly the longest album I've put on this week but certainly not skimpy with its music. However, every time it finishes, it feels like I've only been listening for about ten minutes. Its eleven tracks zoom on by, only two of them lasting longer than four minutes. When they actually pick up a serious pace, like with Wrong Face On, it seems like the track is done in about thirty seconds. I'd listened to it five times before noon and that's just ridiculous for me.

Initially it's good but not great, because the first three songs are just solid and reliable garage rock songs that do exactly what they must without grabbing me by the feels. Maybe that's due to a reliance on sixties pop melodies. Wrong Face On has that uptick in tempo and then Soldier On caught my attention. It's a strong song but that's not why it stood out. It stood out because the influences that I caught weren't the ones that I would have expected from a Hellacopters album. And I don't mean the core riff that's borrowed from Golden Earring's Radar Love.

I expected them to sound like a garage rock band, as indeed they do on much of this album. Check out Faraway Looks, for instance, and you'll find that it's utterly textbook garage rock, built from power chords, flurried beats, a simple but effective riff, punchy vocals and catchy melodies. Sure, there's a little back and forth harmonising that reminds of Blue Öyster Cult and that adds to the effect, but it's mostly what I expect, done really well by a band who have been doing this for over thirty years.

Soldier On, however, has a real southern rock mindset to it and it's far from the only such song on the album. That feel returns on Coming Down, shows up in the melodies on The Stench and then in the epic guitar solo on Leave a Mark that eventually finds that patented southern rock chicken scratch style. It's in moments like that where Lynyrd Skynyrd spring to mind, but the comparison I kept coming back to was The Outlaws, because it's not just the guitarwork, it's the melodies.

Now, Soldier On has odd vocal manipulations in the verses, but that Outlaws sound is unmissable once they get to the bridges and choruses. And, once it's out there, this genie can't be put back into the bottle. It's there on Doomsday Daydreams, it's all over Coming Down like a rash and it's there on later songs, whether it's in the vocal melodies, the builds or the guitars or all of these things together. It frankly changed this album for me and, while I dug punkier garage rock songs like Wrong Face On and Faraway Looks, I liked these dips into southern rock even more.

I'd probably rank Coming Down at the top of the heap, but with Leave a Mark nipping at its heels, especially with its epic guitar solo at the end to stretch it out to five minutes and change. That's a long song for the Hellacopters, even kicking off with a bass intro that's not far off what Lemmy used to do back in his Hawkwind days. I'm not finding a line-up online, so I don't know if this is the work of Dolf DeBorst, who Wikipedia tells me joined in 2018 but doesn't appear on any albums, a contradictory statement given that this is their second album since reforming in 2016.

Doomsday Daydreams keeps growing on me, so I'd throw that in there as another highlight, and, back in more traditional territory, Faraway Looks and Wrong Face On are right up there as well. I'd usually call an album with five highlights out of eleven a gimme for an recommended 8/10 rating, but Soldier On, with its southern rock flavour, and The Stench with a bluesier version of the same, are the only others that I like a lot. That means four songs that are just there, including the first three, which is an odd state of affairs, and that's telling too.

Then I realised that I've listened through this album maybe eight or nine times now and, even if some songs still refuse to pop for me, I haven't felt the need to skip any of them even once. That firmed this back up as an 8/10. I haven't heard its predecessor, 2022's Eyes of Oblivion, but I'd say on the basis of this one that the band are really enjoying their reunion and maybe feeling some flexibility in their sound. DeBorst aside, if indeed that's him on bass, everyone else is long term.

Nicke Andersson, Robert Eriksson and Dregen were founder members, even if the latter left for quite a while. Anders Lindström only missed the first few years but has been there ever since. I'd say they're having a blast and, while I like them doing what they've always done, I can only hope that they keep exploring this southern rock direction. Coming Down and Leave a Mark especially show that they do it really well.

The Cosmic Gospel - Cosmic Songs for Reptiles in Love (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Dec 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

I could swear blind that I received this album as a submission for review but I can't find any details of that anywhere: no download, no e-mail, no message, no nothing. So maybe I was dreaming, but I took a listen anyway on Bandcamp and found it an interesting album, especially immediately after the weird but wonderful new Gama Bomb album, which is different in almost every way. This is pop music that's far too interesting to be just pop music, with the Beatles's psychedelic years the first point of reference. It's also often psychedelic rock, occasionally progressive rock and sometimes a little garage rock too, though this latter is rarely forceful.

The Cosmic Gospel is primarily one man in Macerata, Italy who writes, records and mixes, as well as singing and playing most of the instruments on this debut album. He's Gabriel Medina and he even painted the cover art, I believe. The only other musician involved is Louie Cericola who contributed some keyboard work on Core Memory Unlocked from his Korg Sigma. The Bandcamp page suggests that these songs were either inspired or grew out of songs by other bands that Medina must have been involved with that were either never finished or not released, so its patchwork nature makes sense.

If there's a common thread, it's that most of these songs create a particular mood that is utterly subverted by their lyrics. Usually, that means perky moods and dark lyrics, but occasionally that's reversed. I often let albums wash over me without actively seeking out their lyric sheets, but this only works that way if we refuse to let odd words and phrases grab our attention because they're not remotely part of the mood we're in. I'd suggest that following the lyrics isn't the best way for a listener to go, because Medina delivers lyrics in an unstructured manner, almost conversationally, finding whatever melody works. Letting it wash over us is better, treating it as an instrument, but it's going to get jarring when you realise what he's singing.

Exhibit A, your honour, is the opening track, It's Forever Midnight. It's a perky opener, with garage rock guitar, synth handclaps and Medina's soft psychedelic voice. It's laid back but catchy, masking dark lyrics about our narrator breaking into his neighbour's house to save his baby from perverted Mr. Goose. It's a happy psychedelic pop song with some subdued garage rock emphasis until we're in on the story, at which point it only gets darker the more we think about it. Is this an actual baby or a term of endearment for a girlfriend? Does that make it better or worse? What precisely does perverted mean here? Maybe we don't want to know.

Exhibit B would be the song after it, The Richest Guy on the Planet is My Best Friend. It opens with sugar sweet synths taking the place of the guitars, which only show up on slightly more emphatic sections. It's less perky but it's still happy until the lyrics start to make us wonder. This one's open to more interpretation but it could easily be read as a cult suicide. Whatever it means, it doesn't mean anything sugar sweet unless there's something seriously wrong with our brain.

Exhibit C works the same way but the other way around. Core Memory Unlocked opens soft like a folky psychedelic pop song from the late sixties, flutes behind a strummed acoustic guitar. It's less Beatles here and more Vashti Bunyan, maybe as covered by Tyrannosaurus Rex. There's a sadness here that wasn't on the opening couple of songs, but its lyrics reflect simple melancholic longing rather than anything actively dark. So, as the music darkens, the lyrics lighten. That's not a usual approach, but I found it fascinating.

What else I found fascinating is how this often feels relatively simple, built on simple melodies in that Beatles-esque way. Their most powerful songs were often the most simple and Medina knows that. However, there are a number of places on this album where he dips into something far more complex. There's some of this on Hot Car Song, which is more emphatic from the outset, its John Kongos beat shifting into almost a Cramps vibe at points, but this mostly kicks in at the end of the blobfish song, Psychrolutes Marcidus Man, when it shifts into what sounds like a kazoo orchestra.

The Demon Whispers opens like avant-garde classical, but its ominous nature is overwhelmed by a folky acoustic guitar, the unusual returning halfway with the advent of a theremin-like melody. It gives way to Wrath and Ghosts, which starts out unusual and only gets more so as it builds. This is an almost entirely electronic track onto which voices are added, though they may be manipulated samples. It becomes an avant-garde choral piece for a while, like Henry Cow taking György Ligeti and shifting his polyphony into something prog.

It's been too long since I've been this surprised by an album in any way other than quality. Sure, it happens that I expect a lot from a band who fail to deliver or not much from one that utterly nails it this time out. Here, I had no expectations of quality because it's a debut album. What I expected was something psychedelic, with influences beyond the Beatles listed on Bandcamp being Damon Albarn, Beck and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I wasn't expecting this experimentation and the thoroughly unusual contrast between music and lyrics. So, thank you if anyone actually did send a copy of this over to me. If not, I must have dreamed my way into an interesting find.

TAFKAVince Band - A Problematic Opera (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 May 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Kudos to the Artist Formally Known as Vince for a name that grabs attention in a crowded market; it certainly elicited a smile from me when this was submitted for review. Now, it's all fine and good to get eyeballs on your product, of course, but the product has to stand for itself once it's been noticed. Fortunately, this is fun enough stuff to work and Vince isn't new at this, with releases going way back to the nineties.

They describe themselves as glam trash rock 'n' roll, which is as fair a description as any, but to me they sound like a garage rock band playing pop songs, though what precise sort of pop songs has a lot to do with whichever one we're listening to. Expiration Date is a quirky pop song in the vein of maybe Missing Persons, sans squeaky voice, but Sugar Pills ups the punk guitar, even finding what sounds very much like Rose Tattoo's Nice Boys at one point, and Conquer the World dips obviously into seventies glam rock. That's a riff we might expect from the Sweet but the vocals don't follow suit.

While Vince himself delivers the most prominent voice on Expiration Date, his is not the only voice here because Lauren Kurtz also sings lead and the pair often sing the same thing together. In some songs, it's hard to tell which is singing lead and which backup, because they're kind of both singing both. That leads me to pull in a B-52s comparison, but this is rock music just as much as it's pop and the B-52s never quite went there. Maybe this is the B-52s with a little Cramps thrown into the mix. However, each song, for all that they play consistently together, generates different comparisons.

There's some straight up rock 'n' roll soloing on Magazine Pages but it approaches rock 'n' roll the way the Beatles did, so it's very much a pop song rocked up. This would be an easy song for a bunch of different bands to cover and put their own very different spins onto it. The title track, even with that nod to opera in its name, is old school British punk in the Buzzcocks style but with those poppy vocals. Of course, it drops into a pop opera midway, complete with guest accordion and euphonium, of all things, and it ends, after the band have downed their instruments, in solo calypso guitar. This is agreeably unusual and highlights how Vince isn't interested in playing every song the same way.

In fact, the only song that feels pretty straightforward is Rabbit Hole, which is the closest to pure garage rock. It kicks off with drums, adds bass and unfolds exactly as we might expect for a bunch of young musicians playing in a garage with simple equipment. Except when it isn't, because they just have to throw something more unusual into the mix and here that comes in Kurtz's vocals, as she adds quirky flourishes here and there to punctuate their typical joint male/female lead.

And that's it, because this is an EP rather than a full album, with the length the most obvious flaw. There are only six tracks on offer and they're generally not particularly long, four of them ending under three minutes and the relatively sprawling Expiration Date only lasting to three and a half. That just leaves Conquer the World to stretch out to a breath over five minutes, making it almost an epic for this band. That means that this EP wraps in under twenty minutes, which isn't long for an established and experienced band. Then again, it's only $7 on Bandcamp, so it's fairly priced.

I liked this, in large part because it feels honest. I've heard a lot of very carefully produced albums in 2023, where engineers, mixers and producers have dedicated energy to making them sound exactly right. This, on the other hand, feels exactly like the five members of the band showed up, plugged in and blistered through twenty minutes of music on the spin, just for the love of performing. The only reason I know this really was produced is because there are moments clearly done in post, like the radio voices within Expiration Date.

The point is that this back to basics approach feels vibrant and refreshing. I bet they have a lot of fun on a live stage and, given that they're based out of Chicago, maybe I'll have chance at seeing them some day. Thanks for sending this over, folks!

Pink Fairies - Screwed Up (2023)

Country: UK
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Jul 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Wikipedia

This was released back in July but I've only just noticed, so I'm reviewing it now because, hey, I can. If you don't know the name, they're a legendary British rock band whose alumni include musicians as diverse as science fiction author Mick Farren, T Rex percussionist Steve Peregrine Took and the original Motörhead guitarist, Larry Wallis. Current band leader Paul Rudolph played on their first two albums and some Brian Eno solo efforts, then he replaced Lemmy in Hawkwind. Joining him on what I think is his fifth stint with the band are ex-Hawkwind bassist Alan Davey and the only other member of the original Motörhead line-up I haven't mentioned yet, drummer Lucas Fox.

With those connections, it probably shouldn't be surprising that Hawkwind are one of the obvious influences here, and indeed there's a kinda sorta Hawkwind cover here in Hassan I Sahba, with an interesting guest appearance from Hawkwind violinist Simon House. I say kinda sorta because it's a Paul Rudolph song, written with Robert Calvert, so it's not entirely a cover, and it sounds utterly authentic, especially when followed by a dreamy space rock instrumental in Dreamzzz and a piece of space rock ambience with a title as quintessential for the genre as It Came from Zeta-77073. A later piece, Big Pink Chopper, plays in the same ballpark.

However, Hassan I Sahba doesn't show up until track four and the album builds towards it with the title track, Digital Sin and WhatchaGonnaDo all sounding like garage rock songs that merely have an increasing amount of psychedelia infused into them. Sure, Rudolph's guitar is psychedelic over Screwed Up, but the rhythm section is no nonsense solid and the vocals, as they across the album, are basic but effective and appropriate. When they're playing songs with hooks and choruses and riffs and all the other typical components of rock music, it's done without any frills at all, just like they recorded it live in the studio.

Given that, and song titles like Screwed Up, Punky and Big Pink Chopper, it probably shouldn't be a surprise to realise that the overall sound is exactly the sort of thing that might catch your ear as it comes blaring out of a random nothing bar. You follow it in and, a few pints later, realise that it's a highly varied audience, so you're surrounded by rockers, metalheads, punks and bikers, a melting pot who are all totally on board with it, because the Pink Fairies are common ground in exactly the same way that Motörhead always were. This is that sort of old school. "We just play rock 'n' roll."

Talking of Motörhead, We Can't Get Any Closer could have been an early Motörhead song, except, of course, that it isn't. Suddenly Rudolph's vocals seem out of place, on a song he probably wrote, simply because he isn't Lemmy and the song conditions us to expect his memorable voice. Davey's bass is closer to Lemmy's and that just adds to the effect. Fox, of course, drummed for Motörhead, so it can't surprise that he can sound like he's still there. Wayward Son does a similar job but with better success for Rudolph, who stamps his authority over it with both vocals and guitar, even if it could again have been a Motörhead song.

I haven't heard the Pink Fairies in forever, but I'm very happy to hear them again in this latest of a countless number of incarnations. The sense of fun that the glorious cover art suggests is here on most of the vocal songs, but only WhatchaGonnaDo cares to actually dip into comedy in the sort of way that Dumpy's Rusty Nuts might have done. Digital Sin also manages to get some surprisingly deep social commentary into its lyrics without losing its sense of fun. They're strong when rocking out with regular rock instruments; they're strong when experimenting in Hawkwind style without most or any of the above; and, crucially, both those sides work well together.

I liked this on a first listen but it didn't feel like it would necessarily work as well on a second time through. I was happy to find that it did and continued to do so on a third and fourth. In fact, it felt more complete as an album the more times I listened to it. Tracks I initially thought were weaker grew on me and only one faded away, which is the closer, In the Ether. It never bugged me so much that I removed it from the playlist but, as everything else grew, it started to feel a little awkward in their company. It's here as a way for the album to end and that's its only real value.

So, given that the Pink Fairies have never really had a stable line-up since they were founded, way back in 1969, I wonder how long this one will stay in place. Certainly there wasn't a single musician who played on both 2017's Naked Radio and 2018's Resident Reptiles, but the line-up on the latter is the line-up here, meaning two albums from either side of the great gap that was COVID, so I'd hold out a little hope for a third album from this trio in a year or two. How about it, lads?

One Horse Band - Useless Propaganda (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

I was planning to review the third album from John Diva and the Rockets of Love today, but I found myself digging too far into why it underwhelmed me to quickly acknowledge that, if I wrote a review, it would be the sort of negative review I try to avoid. Instead, I checked out a few others and came up short until this one, from a band from Milan who play an interesting form of garage rock. I came close to ditching this one too, because the opener, Santa Claus, doesn't start out like that at all, its approach more like an attempt to merge Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan into a cool unique voice. And that's fine, but it wasn't what I was looking for.

However, I didn't turn it off because I was interested to see where the album went, and it went in a very different direction a couple of minutes in and especially once Killing Floor showed up. This is where the garage rock kicks in, with a drummer who sounds like he only has three drums in his kit but he's happy to beat the crap out of each of them for us. The vocals are still deliberately whiskey soaked but far more emphatic and driving melodies rather than singer/songwriter introspections. The guitar rocks and the kazoo... well, let's just say that it sounds very much like someone's playing a kazoo here and I sure ain't judging because it sounds great, like a bunch of interesting musicians jamming in their garage.

As the album goes, it sounds like the band shift further backwards in time. Supersonic ditches the kazoo but keeps everything else and feels primal, like something the Sonics might have recorded a lot more decades ago now than is comfortable to think about. It's a Gimmick emphasises that they like looking back, because it sounds like a fifties pop song rocked up in loud but simplistic fashion, a sort of Dion & The Belmonts type of song. It feels unusual because whoever the lead vocalist is in One Horse Band sings the verses but leaves the chorus to a backing singer. Also it heavies up when we don't expect, which is another tasty touch.

As you might expect for garage rock, there's a punk sound here too and that's clear once we get to Useless Propaganda and Hello Charlie. That rough voice suggests traditional punk influences but a post-punk mindset in the melodies. I hear the Clash here, both original first album sound and later adventures beyond it. Of course, this isn't the only layer, because Useless Propaganda ends with a sort of Supremes refrain and Hello Charlie adds a trumpet to give it a more avant-garde edge. It's a heady mixture and it highlights how much energy there must be in One Horse Band's garage on rehearsal nights.

Now, the energy does drop at points for effect, because One Horse Band aren't a one trick pony. In Ice Cream, the power is stripped away in a flash to leave the singer returning to the Waits whisper on the opener, set against a loud slow blues backdrop, and I Sing opens up with a delicate folk tune that sounds like it's being played in a hip coffee house, before it launches into full on garage punk, just to shock the hipsters sipping their expensive artisan coffees. A Little More is delicate too, but it stays that way, even as it builds. It showcases a different side of the band but it's effective. What I find strange here is that I wasn't sold on the quiet voice on Santa Claus but I love it on Ice Cream and A Little More.

What this all adds up to is that, if I was wandering past the One Horse Band garage during one of their rehearsals, I'd absolutely stop and listen. I wouldn't think they were anything special initially, just good at what they do, but, as time would pass and song would move to song, my estimation of their worth would continue to increase. There's a lot more on this album than the initial approach suggests and it's all tasty stuff.

And, all that said, I've probably misled you, because the key word in One Horse Band isn't Band but One. That's because there's only one musician here, ignoring the trumpet Tom Moffet contributes to Hello Charlie, and he's called One Horse Band because he wears a fake horse head everywhere public, in the same way that Buckethead wears a fried chicken bucket. Oh, and yes, he performs as a one man band in the sense that he plays multiple instruments at the same time on stage. That's why the drum sound is so simple. And this is his third album.

So, what's his name and what's he's hiding? I haven't the faintest idea, but he sounds great. Which famous musicians live in Milan but are never seen at One Horse Band shows? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Nuclear Banana - Riot on Kansas City Strip (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2022
Sites: Official Website | YouTube

Here's an unusual submission, given that vocalist and guitarist Joey Skidmore kindly sent me the album on banana yellow vinyl, which is a first. Thank you, sir! Then again, Joey does tend to do the sort of things that nobody else does, which is how I discovered his work in the first place, albeit in a film with a connection to music. That was Legend of the Shoe Man, with an appearance from Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas fame, about whom Joey directed a documentary feature, Jim Dandy to the Rescue. He's not in Joey's cult horror musical comedy, Kiki Meets the Vampires, but a bunch of other musicians are, most obviously the French punk band Les Fossoyeurs, for whom the Kiki of the title sings lead and plays saxophone.

In keeping with his apparent hobby of collecting interesting people, here's a new album featuring a varied selection of musical legends who I presume are part of the music scene in Kansas City, Missouri. It's a garage rock album in the sense of the sixties originals rather than the much later revival bands of the new millennium like the White Stripes and the Strokes. Think back to Love, the Sonics or the Electric Prunes, maybe even the MC5 but not quite so intense.

The biggest name is surely Tony E. Valentino of the Standells, one of those pioneering proto-punk bands whose influence is hard to calculate. Valentino plays guitar on all the eight tracks here and he sings one, one of a pair of Standells covers, Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White. His voice blew me away, because I could have sworn I was listening to a young girl singing rather than an old man of eighty. It's beautifully pure and crystal clear, especially over what is an anomalous acoustic backing.

The other songs are all electric, including the other Standells cover, Medication, which is solid but not as notable. The best song here, to my mind, is a further cover, of Barry McGuire's famous folk rock song, Eve of Destruction, because Skidmore really gets his teeth into the vocals, intonating in style, and the band behind him is clearly having a lot of fun.

Behind Valentino and Skidmore, who both play guitar, are a couple more guitarists: Elan Portnoy of the Fuzztones and Eric Ambel of the original Blackhearts band, as well as the Del-Lords and the Dukes, Steve Earle's band. Jeremy Chatzky on bass has toured with Bruce Springsteen and Ronnie Spector's bands and played with some of my favourite singer/songwriters, such as Laura Cantrell, Steve Earle and Patty Scialfa. On drums is Manga, about whom I know nothing [edit: Joey kindly let me know that he's the drummer with Les Fossoyeurs], but the Hammond organ is played by Mark Stein of Vanilla Fudge fame. That's heck of a lot of talent to gather within what really ought to have been a garage to jam through some covers and some original tunes.

Talking of originals, I'd call out two of those as highlights too, namely the bookends of the album. You're Worth the Risk opens up with an almost AC/DC intro but Stein's Hammond kicks in to take us in a different direction, which is underlined by Skidmore's lived in vocals. He's not as good here as he is on Eve of Destruction and he doesn't sing on the closer, because it's an instrumental, called I Wanna Know, and it's a glorious guitar jam, Skidmore and Valentino joined by Chatzky, Manga and the research lawyer turned jazz organist Ken Lovern, who's gloriously old school.

The other originals are Scooter Girl, a solid garage rock number with a heavier bass than it would have had back in the day but which would play well as a double A-side single with You're Worth the Risk, and Harry's Ghost, which is the quirkiest song here. Skidmore delivers a sort of spoken word lyric in a whiskey-drenched cowboy sort of voice, which is an interesting texture indeed. It grows a lot, ending up with some imaginative Hammond organ from Lovern and conch shells from one man band Bill "Jazzbo" Hargrave. He was in Legend of the Shoe Man and Kiki Meets the Vampires.

And that leaves the remaining cover, which is of the debut Rolling Stones single, Tell Me, originally released in 1964. It's a decent cover if not a highlight, Skidmore channelling that cowboy vibe with a side of Lou Reed but harmonised well by most of the band. Many of these musicians have played Skidmore's annual music festival in Kansas City, with their regular bands, which I really need to get to one of these years. Last year's was headlined by the Seeds, but the Nuclear Banana were there on the bill, as was Valentino separately. Vanilla Fudge played there in 2019.

Thanks, Joey. I had a lot of fun with this album, which I've been listening to all night.

Loose Sutures - A Gash with Sharp Teeth and Other Tales (2021)

Country: Italy
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Oct 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's something interesting from Sardinia, a second album by a band who describe themselves as a "blend of hard-stoner rock with a pinch of garage spirit and modern punk attitude." That's not unfair but it misses out a retro mindset towards psychedelia. While the instrumental opener, White Vulture, is very much stoner/hard rock with fuzzy guitar and subdued pace, that's not everything in this band's arsenal and Stupid Boy promptly highlights that.

It ditches both the subdued pace and the instrumental approach in favour of something untamed and frantic. The idiosyncratic vocals are truly wild, a lofi holler that combines Screaming Jay Hawkins with Fred Schneider of the B-52s, delivered through a Rudy Vallee megaphone. The guitar is as rhythmic as the drums and its tone hints at an electronic pulse that isn't otherwise here. There are sound effects at odd moments as well, such as a breaking glass. The end result is as close to a psychobilly outfit like Demented are Go as it is to a heavy stoner group like Monster Magnet and it makes for a fascinating mixture.

They haven't betrayed all of their influences yet and the eight remaining tracks continue to highlight other facets of their sound. Sunny Cola adds the Doors and Black Sabbath at once, especially during the heavy psych midsection with its guest solo by from Marco Nieddu, the founder of Electric Valley Records, home to Cancervo. There's more Sabbath on Last Cry too, but a different Sabbath, this one aiming at simple but effective riffs rather than slow doomy heaviness. But Sabbath are a gimme of an influence. The second half of the song adds some Hawkwind bass and space vibes to underline the fact that texture is as important to Loose Sutures as anything else.

This is an album to listen to, of course, but it's also an album to feel. I enjoyed this as a piece of music, closing my eyes to listen to, say, the instrumental midsection in Mephisto Rising, which barrels along as effortlessly and as characteristically as the underrated instrumental midsections in songs like War Pigs. But I felt it too. This album is made up as much of dry dust in your eyes and the smell of gasoline and the sweat hanging in the air of a bar after the gig is over and everyone's gone home as it is beats riffs and hooks.

As you might imagine from that, this is a dirty album that almost has to start out used and abused. It would be weird to walk into a record store and walk out with this album in pristine condition. It ought to be something you discover like buried treasure in a dusty crate underneath a market stall in a city it had no right to have ever visited, like a souk in Marrakech. Sure, the cover had been folded at some point and it's bumped around the edges and there's dried blood on the inner sleeve, but it tells you in no uncertain terms that you have to buy it and you never regret that spur of the moment decision.

I just wish I could figure out all the influences. I can recognise a lot of the classic rock in here, even if I can't identify which specific song Last Cry reminds me of—I was almost singing along on my first time through but couldn't quite find the wrong words. I'm still learning about stoner rock, which is clearly the primary influence here. But there's rockabilly and punk and garage and even a bit of psychedelic pop here too and I'm just not well versed enough in these genres to pull out who Loose Sutures grew up on. I just know that I'd love to see a list to turn into a sonic rabbit hole.

I've mentioned most of my favourite songs thus far—Sunny Cola and Mephisto Rising—but there's one more that I haven't got to yet because it wraps up the album. It's Death Valley II, the longest piece on offer at six and a half minutes (ironically making it as long as the shortest track on yesterday's Dream Theater album), and it's as wide open as everything else here isn't.

The garage angle to this album means that we're agreeably trapped with the band inside a cramped venue with the sound and sweat and charisma dripping off the walls. Death Valley II is more a desert rock piece in that it feels like we're outside in the middle of nowhere, the band jamming on a stage a long way away even though the sound carries to us perfectly in the wind. Oddly enough, Death Valley I doesn't feel like that, but Death Valley II is a great way to leave us because we're already halfway out of there as it's playing, even if we hear every note and it all stays with us for the rest of our journey, however long that takes. I like that.

The Limit - Caveman Logic (2021)

Country: USA/Portugal
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Here's a new band full of musicians who aren't at all new and I have no idea how to categorise them. I labelled this hard rock as a very vague catchall, and that's one obvious ingredient, but you do need to know a lot more than that. There's a lot of punk in here, some psych, some blues, some garage, some psychobilly, some post-punk. If Lemmy was looking over my shoulder, he'd just call it rock 'n' roll. What it isn't is a metal album, even with sixty per cent of the band known for their work in a couple of metal bands. And, before I rabbit on any longer, I should really introduce those musicians.

Handling vocal duties is Bobby Liebling, who's fronted American doom metal pioneers Pentagram for half a century, since they were founded in 1971. Also from the world of doom metal are two members of a Portuguese band called Dawnrider. That's Hugo Conim on guitar, which he's played in Dawnrider since that band was founded in 2004, and Joao Pedro on drums, his responsibility there since 2014. The other guitarist is Sonny Vincent, a prolific solo artist who was in an early New York City punk band by the name of the Testors; he also spent nine years on the road with Moe Tucker and Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground. That leaves Jimmy Recca on bass, best known for being an early member of the Stooges.

There's a lot to note here. For one this has serious garage rock sensibilities. It's lo-fi, but it's also well produced. They didn't just show up, plug in and press record, but the album maintains that live in the studio feel, even though the sound engineer clearly worked hard to get everything just right and the producer knew exactly how to tweak things. It's one of the most immediate and urgent recordings I've heard in a long time and that's aided by a deliberate lack of frills. Nobody's messing around ao clever things in the studio. They're just playing the hell out of their instruments.

For another, the sound is punk but the mindset feels more hard rock. This follows the rules instead of breaking them, at least for the most part. It's clean and riff driven, with guitar solos everywhere. If a song isn't specifically doing something else, Vincent is slipping in a quick solo because he can. He's all over Kitty Gone like a rash. And this makes for a fascinating mixture of two related but very different styles, both of which require this to be played loud.

The most obvious influence may be the Stooges, even though Liebling doesn't always sound like Iggy. That's certainly there at points and he finds the right snarl when he needs to, but he's not channeling any single voice. He sings his own way and only hints at another voice when the song suggests it. He's Glenn Danzig on Over Rover, which is a bizarre take on the Misfits with a doomy riff that reminded me of Atomic Rooster. There's even a spoken word section over a creeping bass and weird guitar noises.

This play with genres is fascinating. There's some Adam and the Ants in Over Rover too and it's overt at the beginning of Fleeting Thoughts, one of the snarling songs for Liebling, which he delivers with a real relish. Human vs. Nature is quintessential garage rock but it has lots of psychobilly in there too, like the band overdosed on the Tommy Gunn Theme. Enough's Enough is straight up Cream, a bluesy performance from Vincent and a dense heavy blues rock sound. Death of My Soul takes the Doors into doom rock.

I liked this a lot, even though some of these songs are predictably short, down to Life's Last Night at a mere minute and a half, even though it features my favourite line: "Lots of rope and not much hope." Six others fail to reach three minutes and only one makes it past four. There's just not much intention for anything to do more than the core of what it's supposed to do. Nobody's indulgent, even in a solo-rich song like Kitty Gone, and nobody wants to spin out choruses ad infinitum, like the Eagles and the thoughts they had about limits. I think there's only one intro here that goes beyond a foreshadowing riff and that's six seconds long.

I have no idea what audience this will reach in 2021, but it deserves to find one. It seems very much to me that they should support Alice Cooper on his next tour. It might seem odd to suggest the godfather of theatrical rock should sign up a band who I can't believe have a stage show, but they fit nicely in his recent dabblings with garage rock. The Limit could easily cover Go Man Go without it seeming out of place amidst their own songs. Of course, I have no idea at all if they're planning to tour or even record again. I hope so.

Moonshine Moaner - Life Bites (2021)

Country: The Netherlands
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Here's an album that sounds refreshingly natural from somewhere in the Netherlands. Apparently the four musicians involved have known each other for three decades, from a host of different bands, but who hadn't played together in this formation before. In 2017, guitarist Joop Wallerbosch, who wrote all these songs, and vocalist Mark Barneveld asked their friends, bassist Rowdy Lemaire and drummer Wybren Grooteboer, to do just that and "did not take no for an answer".

And if I hadn't cribbed all that off the band's website, I'd have figured out some of it because this has the contrasting stamps of experience and freshness all over it. For instance, there isn't anything flash here, but that's not because these guys aren't up to it; it's because years of playing has taught each of them that less is often more and that you don't need a lot of notes when you have the right notes. Yet there's a freshness to everything, as if each of these musicians relishes being able to bring something of what they do to a new table. They're not showing off to us at all, but maybe they are showing off a little bit to each other.

They're also working from a very broad musical palette. It's The Hurt that grabbed me, with its garage feel, alternative feel and seventies glam feel. It's a deceptively loose song that hints at Nirvana, David Bowie and the B-52s all at the same time. It's the opening track on this album but it's not a template for the rest of it to follow. Both Sun and One of a Kind are more traditional rock songs but with funky guitar lines. Wicked Game starts out with the feel of a Thin Lizzy ballad. Love, Peace and Happiness is reminiscent of the Beatles in the seventies.

And that's just the first half. In short, the individuals in this band clearly have broad listening tastes and they're happy to explore them with some ambition within the ten songs on this, their debut. I'm not sure I'm catching all the lyrics to Daily Bread, which appears to me to be about music as a form of daily sustenance, with namechecks to Jim and Janis, Cobain, Elvis and the Walrus.

It's also fair to say that the music is emphatically what matters because the production doesn't do the usual job so much as set the levels properly and get out of the way. Apparently the band converted an old cow shed on the German border into their studio and it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't simply jam in there until everything felt right, then someone pressed record. It doesn't feel live in the sense that the band could be playing on my desk just to me, which sometimes happens, but it does feel live in the sense that they're playing to each other in a small space.

And much of what I've just said stops after eight songs, because the final two feel like the band turned round and finally noticed that we've been listening in all along, so decided to perform for us instead of themselves. Weatherman is jauntier, flashier and a lot more overt, with easily the heaviest guitar tone thus far, though it's grungier than it is metal. It also kicks off with a sample and wraps up with a neatly production ending, so it's far more deliberate. And Skinny Girls is slicker still, easily the most commercial song here, as if, now they have an audience, they'll throw their single at us.

I dug this a lot. It feels real and natural and honest. I'm sure Moonshine Moaner would be happy if we all bought this album and made each of their lives more financially comfortable, but somehow I have a feeling that they're happy just playing music together too and that rubs off on us. I felt happier just for listening to it.

Guided by Voices - Mirrored Aztec (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 21 Aug 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I'm an Englishman living in Arizona and today is Thanksgiving, one of the big holidays of the year but one I never quite grasped. It's a remembrance of a historical moment but the history is wildly skewed; it's an opportunity to be thankful for everything that we have, but it's followed by the national greed day, Black Friday; and it's an excuse to gorge on turkey and pass out from the tryptophane, hardly my idea of how to spend a holiday. So, it seems appropriate to review an album by a major American band that I struggle to understand.

Guided by Voices have been around since 1983 and they're firmly in the indie rock genre, if that's one single thing. Their earliest releases were self-financed, self-pressed and circulated mostly amongst the family and friends of the band. They've always been prolific, but they've been outdoing themselves of late. They've issued no fewer than ten albums since reforming for the second time in 2016 and this one is one of three from 2020 alone, with Surrender Your Poppy Field and Styles We Paid For.

As you might imagine, such prolificity means that quality may not be the band's primary concern, but there's a strong sense of consistency here. No song seems more essential or more throwaway than any other and, especially with titles like Easier Not Charming, A Whale is Top Notch and Haircut Sphinx, I could easily imagine this being the result of a single day in the studio improvising songs from a slew of random words held up in the sound engineer's booth. "OK, the next pair of words are... 'nest' and... 'biker'. Go!" I do salute the band's creativity.

Actually, I rather like Biker's Nest and quite a few other songs, because it stands out from the crowd a little. It kicks in with a simple punk riff and I could have imagined any one of Iggy Pop, Pete Shelley or Nina Hagen jumping in for a guest vocal slot. None of those do, of course, so we stay with Robert Pollard, who's often uncannily reminiscent of David Bowie, especially on songs like Haircut Sphinx or Bunco Men, which sound like newly discovered lost BBC sessions from seventies Bowie.

The overall sound of Mirrored Aztec is kind of like the middle ground between Bowie and Cake, which is apparently in a garage somewhere in Dayton, OH. Whether the dominant sound of any song is Cake in the nineties or Bowie in the seventies, almost everything sounds like lo-fi garage rock recorded on an antique four track with no overdubs.

The songs are blink and you'll miss 'em quick, as you might expect from garage rock. Let's just say that the album only just nudges its way past forty minutes but it boasts no fewer than eighteen songs. I'm counting seven that don't even make it to two minutes and A Whale is Top Notch only just manages a minute. Maybe "whale" and "notch" didn't spark many ideas. Length appears to be a concern too; I haven't heard quite so many songs on a single album fade out in forever. Please Don't Be Honest is just reaching full speed when it fades out because, apparently, 2:29 is a long song for this album. Thank You Jane ends so abruptly that the tape might have run out.

And, while I'm probably sounding rather dismissive here, I liked quite a lot of this album. It's merely difficult to keep up. By the time one song's groove starts to sit well, that song's over and we're onto a fresh one before we can really acknowledge what it was. I like Bunco Men and Biker's Nest and even an apparent joke of a song called Math Rock. I liked some others too, but I kept losing track of which. In a year in which Guided by Voices have issued 48 new songs over three albums, that's easy to do.

Clavicule - Garage is Dead (2020)

Country: France
Style: Psychedelic Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

Garage is dead, say Clavicule, releasing what is really a psychedelic garage rock album. The results tell me that garage is far from dead and nobody has even nailed it to the perch. It's clearly alive and well in Rennes, up there in the northwest of France, where Clavicule have mixed it with an intriguing array of sounds. There's Hawkwind in here but Danzig too and Dick Dale and, quite frankly, I never expected to write those names in the same sentence.

This looks like their debut album, though it features the three tracks made previously available on a self-titled EP last year, including the opener, a sensitive little ditty entitled Asshole. This starts out with some surf rock in the guitar but restrained surf against a lofi garage rock backdrop. As it hits full stride and the vocals come in, they're punky in the vein of Glenn Danzig. That's an odd mix but it works really well and it hooked me.

There's no Danzig in the second song, Special Trip, because there's a layer on top of the vocals that gives it a spacy effect. With the vibe generated a hallucinogenic one and the beat an emphatic one, it's not difficult to hear some old school Hawkwind in the song and hey, that works really well too. It shows some neat versatility in the band, even though the two songs aren't as far away from each other sonically as I may have suggested.

Today feels more like garage pop, just as emphatic and just as raw but with a slower Beatles vibe in the construction. There's indie rock in here too, a genre I don't know well enough to highlight comparisons to, but that's where garage rock usually fits so it shouldn't be too surprising. The rhythm is an emphatic old school dance rhythm and the middle eastern sounds in the solos help it to sound almost flamenco.

If that's a wide set of influences, it's a tasty one and Clavicule mix them up over the rest of the album. My Time might start out like an Adam Ant demo but, when it speeds up, it does so with a wild garage flamenco transition. I live for moments like that one. CAB has a flamenco rhythm too, but goes deep into the surf sound three minutes in, which becomes neatly intense, and that sound gets even more delightful when the riffs shift over to keyboards. I'm a big fan of the bass too when the song breaks down towards the end.

Garage bands don't tend to play long songs, but there are two here, with CAB being the first. At 7:19, it's double the average length of the rest, but it never outstays its welcome because it's constructed in phases. Strangely, if CAB is one of my highlights here, my least favourite song is the other long song on offer, Jericho, which closes out the album with an uncharacteristic patience for 6:25. It's the only piece of music here that doesn't take me anywhere, except during its ethnic sections.

I know next to nothing about the band, though Facebook tells me that they're a four piece, with two guitars. Marius plays one and also takes care of the vocals, while Kamil plays the other. Ian handles an occasionally funky bass and Alexis brings an often punky vibe to the drums, or more appropriately in French, the batterie. I have no idea who's responsible for the castanets in the second half of Vertigo, when everything goes garage flamenco again.

While my favourite songs, like My Time and CAB, can be found at the heart of the album, moments like the beginning and end of Vertigo are also highlights and there are plenty more of those. The Race has a particularly epic ending, while The Monkey starts out like Mark Knopfler has stepped in on guitar. I'd given up by that point on any expectation that Clavicule wouldn't just keep on surprising me. I don't think their styles work as well on a ballad, but I won't complain, especially given that The Monkey goes suitably nuts to close.

I really dug this, because it sounds both accessible and highly inventive, a mixture of styles I hadn't heard before that suddenly sound natural together and ought to be mixed more often. Now I really want to hear Clavicule live, maybe alongside a band like The Villainz. That would make for a particularly wild night, hopefully in a tiny but utterly packed club, especially if they join forces at the end of the evening to jam.

Tremendous - Relentless (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 May 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

It's only been a couple of months since I heard the Beau Bowen debut and it blew me away with its throwback to the glam rock of the early seventies, not least David Bowie. Now here comes another British throwback to that era with another notable debut album. Tremendous, which is a ballsy name indeed for a young band (though they are conversely on Horrendous Records), sound totally different to Bowen but they'd make for a great double bill when gigs start back up again.

What's especially interesting to me here is that the list of influences that Tremendous channel isn't remotely confined to early seventies glam rock but that's what they end up sounding like. I'd bring up the Kinks first and most often, but with Mott the Hoople almost as often and others from Oasis to the Sex Pistols fleshing out a working class singer/songwriter sound. Everything here is short and down to earth, like glam rock as garage rock and with only two of ten songs on offer lasting past the three minute mark.

With most of the songs running only two minutes and change, as singles used to be back in the day, there's hardly any time to develop musically, so the band get down to business immediately and focus closely on the central hook. Every song is built around that vocal hook and I was almost surprised when a guitar solo showed up on Like Dreamers Do. There aren't too many of those on this album.

Opener Don't Leave Our Love (Open for Closing) is a fantastic example as it starts out with solo voice, then layers in a heck of a lot before the chorus hits only twenty-four seconds in. That's a grand and impressive ramp up for a first album and it highlights just how much sheer confidence this band has in spades. By comparison, Like Dreamers Do plays it quiet one time through, then builds as they run through again. "We dream of a million things, me and you, as we stare outside and dream like dreamers do," sings Mark Dudzinski, but as he has less than three minutes to play with, he really dreams of one verse twice, a quick solo and a repeating chorus until he's out of time.

These songs are so short that Rock 'n' Roll Satellite is the unusually long song here at a breath over four minutes. It starts out like Def Leppard but quickly shifts into the Lep's key influence, Mott the Hoople. Tremendous may only be a trio but they have enough swagger to sell this song gloriously. It seems surprising that only three musicians can create such a dense sound and that's never so obvious as on Bag of Nails, once we get past the first verse which is quintessential Oasis. Then the wall of sound kicks in and we wonder how anyone can play this quietly. It's raucous and it needs serious ampage.

By this point, only four songs in, I was sold by the music and how mature it all seemed. The downside is easily the lack of lyrics, the standard approach being to repeat one verse a couple of times and let the chorus dominate the rest of the time. It's unashamedly lo-fi and as ballsy as the band name, as if they knew that they could spend time to grow these songs, write a second or third verse here and there, add a guitar solo or three and show off a bit with some clever musicality, but they just couldn't be bothered, so instead they showed up to a studio, knocked out the core of ten songs in an hour and went down the pub for a pint while the label slapped a cover on their work.

I like this band and I like this album, which seems like an effortless slab of punchy garage glam anthems. Dudzinski displays almost no polish here as a singer, his deceptively soft Donovan meets Marc Bolan take on Hell is Only a Blessing Away the most obvious, but he's insanely effective and songwriters will be jealous of how he can turn anything into a solid hook. He's also the band's guitarist and, well, the same could be said there. If he's the heart of the band, then Ryan Jee and David Lee are its backbone, handling bass and drums respectively.

I'm fascinated to see where this band go on future albums. They could shift their sound a little heavier and turn into the next Killers or deepen their sound and go pretty much anywhere they want.

The VillainZ - Sexy & Arrogant (2020)

Country: France
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

All that I can find online suggests that the VillainZ (they capitalise the Z at the end for some reason) really want to be in a Quentin Tarantino movie (I'd say Robert Rodriguez, but they're from France). Everything is attitude, their flavour of garage rock riddled with punk and psychedelia, and the very first song they released (the opener on their 2017 self titled EP) is called Fuck You, We are the VillainZ! That's an emphatic statement. And just look at that album cover by Pedro Delort!

I don't even know who does what because the roles given to the band members are "sexy bitch", "arrogant asshole", "sober hippie" and "weed eater". Jess K. is clearly the singer, her whiskey drenched voice twenty per cent poison and eighty per cent sex. But who's providing those machine gun guitars, that prowling bass and those staccato drumbeats? The line up includes Nic K., Tom C. and Kris C., but I have zero clue who's responsible for what.

I wish I did because they're all enjoyable and I like to give credit. I like those guitars because they tend to be jaunty and add a dark edge behind the vocals. They actually do quite a lot across this album, punctuating urgency into Bloody Milk but providing texture to Kill the Light. Everything here is sex and violence, so when Jess K. gets bubblegum sexy on that latter track, even singing the chorus, the guitar gets more dangerous to back it up.

The bass is highly obvious and always delightful. With the guitar working as texture on songs like Nobody and Kill the Light, the bass effectively plays lead and it works really well. Heavily distorted, it sets the scene for Pink Inside like we're walking into a velvet walled sex club then rumbles with a real purpose as if it took a blue pill on the way in. It introduces many of the songs, grounding them, and duets with the guitar on Me & Him Against the World when the guitar isn't duetting with itself.

And I really like the drums. The drummer is very reliable and doesn't really do anything fancy, but delivers real character on every track in addition to the bounce that drives the whole album. How perky are the drums on Kill the Light, which match the vocals. This song is like a bubblegum pop band taking on a Joy Division song and it's gorgeous. Have you guessed that it's my very favourite here yet?

Talking of stylistic clashes, there are quite a few here and they're usually delightful. You Make Me Hot is Transvision Vamp jamming with Twisted Sister in a European club. No Apologies plays like the theme tune to a imaginary TV show that I'm convinced could never be shown on American TV. Sometimes punk here means Blondie and sometimes it means the Misfits, occasionally both at once. Bloody Milk is oddly like a continental garage rock take on Madness that we ought to hear in a club scene in an R rated movie.

I like this a lot and I'm surprised that the band are currently unsigned. I would love to see them live because the energy levels here suggest that they would absolutely kill. The venue ought to be tiny but packed, the stage low with no security in front of it and the ceiling sweating as much as the band and the crowd. I get the impression that a VillainZ show would be a purge of the system and it should be compulsory for everyone who gets out of COVID-19 lockdown alive.

Mudhoney - Morning in America (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Alternative
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I remember Mudhoney from their earlier days, though I never kept up with the band. I loved their 1988 single Sweet Young Thing Ain't Sweet No More, which I probably heard on the John Peel show and which featured a style I'd never heard before. It was really garage rock but so raw and so achingly slow that it tripped a lot of the same buttons that doom metal does. Of course, before long, it would evolve into grunge and the rest is history.

I had no idea that Mudhoney were back and I was even more surprised to find that they'd never gone away. They've been together since 1988 and their most recent album, their tenth, was last year's Digital Garbage. This EP seems to be a set of outtakes from that album with a few other obscurities. It's not as raw as I remember, but then that single predated any of their albums and they've cleaned up a bit since then. Fortunately, I'd say, not much. This is garage rock not much rawer than the Alice Cooper EP I reviewed yesterday.

There are seven tracks here and four of them tie to that album in some form.

Three are outtakes and my favourite is easily Creeps are Everywhere. It has an effortless nature to it but it's outstandingly catchy. This is what punk pop really ought to be: loud and sneeringly obnoxious but with a fantastic hook. If Digital Garbage was like this, I need to seek it out! I'm less fond of the other two, Morning in America and Snake Oil Charmer, but they're good songs. The former has that agreeably slow burn and is very much of its time, starting out with "America hates itself."

The fourth is Let's Kill Yourself Live Again, which is an alternate take of a Digital Garbage song called Kill Yourself Live; it had previously been the bonus track on the Japanese release. I liked this and caught many influences from Iggy Pop to Joy Division. I'd always heard that grunge's influences all had to be from Seattle, from the Sonics onwards, but I was never quite happy with that propaganda.

That leaves three more. One Bad Actor and Vortex of Lies are both taken from singles. The former was formerly half of a split 7" with Hot Snakes and the latter was a limited tour release in the EU. One Bad Actor has a lot more of that Iggy Pop vibe, Mark Arm snarling in that recognisable way while turning out riffs on an outrageously fuzzy guitar. Vortex of Lies is slower and less effective for me which makes it an odd opener for the EP. It feels like Cake but wilder and less controlled.

And that just leaves Ensam i Natt, which is a cover of a song by the Swedish band known as the Leather Nun. Even though the title is in Swedish, the song is in English, revealing that it means So Lonely Tonight. It's another solid garage rock anthem. It's my other favourite here, even though it's over too quickly at just a breath over two minutes. In fact, this whole EP could have been longer, these seven songs amounting to only twenty-two minutes. If only Mudhoney had had more outtakes!

Alice Cooper - The Breadcrumbs EP (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Sep 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Here's something a little different. We surely all know Alice Cooper, those of us here in Phoenix where he lives especially, but he was born in Detroit and this is a six track tribute to the garage bands from that city. Most of the songs are covers which feature guest musicians from various eras of that scene, from the sixties to the present. Accordingly, it's recognisably Alice Cooper but it also doesn't sound much like what he's doing most of the time nowadays.

I found this fascinating, a lot more so than the Hollywood Vampires debut. I remember that mostly featured covers of songs originally recorded by members of the celebrity drinking club of the same name which Cooper founded. As the members were huge names, those songs were huge songs, most of them so iconic that the band found it almost impossible to reinvent. We all know songs like My Generation, Itchycoo Park and Whole Lotta Love and these new takes didn't seem remotely needed.

These are far more obscure songs so it's easier for Cooper to make them his own. I think he's a lot more successful at it too, because they fall into a consistent sound, even featuring wildly different instruments and a varied set of guests. Let's run through what's here.

Detroit City 2020 is the most obviously Alice Cooper song here, which it is because it's a rework of Detroit City, originally recorded for The Eyes of Alice Cooper album. It featured Wayne Kramer of the MC5 even back in 2003 and he's on this album too. It's a look back at the Detroit music scene and it namechecks a lot of the bands covered here.

Go Man Go is a new original song but it's a very garage punk rebel song, not remotely of the styles Cooper has recorded in lately. He has a lot of fun with the vocal line here, relishing both the lyrics and the delivery. It feels like it was written decades ago by someone else but it wasn't.

East Side Story is a Bob Seger cover, but it's an obscure one. Back in the sixties, Seger played for a number of local bands before he got famous. He wrote East Side Story for the Underdogs, while singing with Doug Brown & The Omens, with whom he made his first recording. It also became his first solo release, the band at the time being called Bob Seger & The Last Heard. That was 1966, eight years before he formed the Silver Bullet Band. It works with Alice's voice and especially with a very lively fuzzy guitar.

Your Mama Won't Like Me gets funky, not least because it adds horns. It's a Suzi Quatro cover, a Chapman/Chinn song that, with an extra M, was the title track of her third album in 1975. I'm not sure any of the words are changed, given that it now tells the story of a bad boy rather than a bad girl, but it may be verbatim. I'll have to go back to find out. It's now going to be stuck in my head all week, na na na na na na, and, well, I'm OK with that.

Devil with a Blue Dress On is the Shorty Long song from 1964, but I presume it's here because Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels recorded it a couple of years later, given that their drummer Johnny 'Bee' Badanjek guests on this version, including a little banter at the outset. The Detroit Wheels single segued into Good Golly Miss Molly, but this take goes into Chains of Love instead, a Dirtbombs cover. Mick Collins, their vocalist and guitarist, is here too. It all wraps up with both songs finishing at once, which is cool.

Last up is Sister Anne, a cover of the MC5 song that opened up their second studio album, High Time, which I'm not sure I've heard; it's so hard to get past the Kick Out the Jams debut without just re-playing. This was a Fred 'Sonic' Smith song but he's been gone since the nineties so it's guitarist Wayne Kramer here instead. And, given that he has ties to two of the songs here, I wonder if he and the others are here throughout as the band on this album rather than as just guests on their own songs.

What I'm guessing, from the cover and the song choices, is that it's Alice on vocals; Mark Farner, lead singer and guitarist for Grand Funk Railroad on guitar; the versatile multi-genre Paul Randolph on bass; and Johnny Badanjek on drums. Whether Collins and Kramer only play on their own songs is up for debate until I can see credits but I'll assume for now that they're both on more than that.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter because this is just good old time garage punk rock music and it sounds damn good with Alice's voice on it. It may be short, but it feels truer to what he does than the Hollywood Vampires debut and it means something different. Recommended for the obscurists! It's likely to have you looking backwards to the originals and that's never a bad thing. Go man, go!