CD REVIEWS
Reviews by Jaime Pina, Billy James, Chad C
Johnny Thunders
From The Beginning To The End
Cleopatra Records
CD Review by Jaime Pina
It’s hard to believe that in his lifetime Johnny Thunders only recorded a handful of legit studio releases before his death but his catalog is enormous. Hardcore collectors have stacks upon stacks of Thunders’ releases and most are live bootlegs or bootlegs of unreleased studio takes and demos. In a way, I think a lot had to do with Johnny’s dope life and the fact that he was unreliable and not a man of his word when it came to coming through with the goods. This three disc release combines demos, a live concert, and some unreleased studio takes. The first disc contains the pre-Dolls demos when Johnny sang for a band called Actress. Future Dolls Arthur Kane and Billy Murcia are joined by guitarist Rick Rivets. These tracks have been available as a single disc and some appeared as bonus tracks on a Dolls before and after the compilation. The quality is not bad and if you don’t already have these tunes they are worth a listen as some songs later morphed into Dolls songs.
The second disc is a Thunders’ live concert recorded live at Max’s. The quality is heavy on reverb but sounds okay. The main reason fans will be interested in this disc is because Johnny is joined by former Dolls David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain and others.
The third disc contains unreleased tracks that Johnny recorded hoping to land a record deal but that didn’t materialize. Some of the tracks appeared on the Studio Bootlegs release. There are two mixes of his redux of You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory. The second of which tries to give the song a Phil Spector- like wall of sound. There are a couple of live bonus tracks and a track featuring Johnny with The Automatics.
The actual box set is nice and sturdy with some great pics of Johnny on the individual cardboard sleeves and a booklet with more pics, an essay, and info on the CD’s. So this is a bit of a mixed bag but if you are a Thunders fanatic it is something you will more than likely want to add to your collection of questionable releases.
The Cheater Slicks
Ill Fated Cusses
In The Red Records
Vinyl review by: Jaime Pina
Originally from Boston but now residing in Columbus, Ohio, the Slicks have been around since 1987 and have released a lot of records and toured around the world. They are a bass-less band and that gives them a unique sound. All in all their music is firmly on the trashy side. But it is obvious the band has a lot going on as far as their personal musical tastes and are not shy about occasionally adding certain flavors to their sound that might seem odd.
If you take a song like Coming Back To Me, at its core the song is one of their trashy rockers. It sounds like it is about to fall apart during the verses with off kilter vocals but then the chorus kicks in and there comes a dark, gothic chorus as the band focuses and reigns in the chaos of the verse. It might sound off-putting in other hands but with this band it works perfectly. This kind of thing happens throughout this great record as the band builds a primitive base and then leaves it up to the mood of the song as far as what they will build upon it. You might hear chimes in a chorus here or a riff that sounds like Blue Cheer there. The original trio is fleshed out on certain songs with bass and keyboards. The exceptional cover art was done by guitarist David Shannon. An outstanding return by The Cheater Slicks.
LEBANON HANOVER STRANGELOVE
All I Ever Wanted a tribute to Depeche Mode
CLEOPATRA Records
CD Review By Billy James
Track List:
- Personal Jesus – Priest
- Enjoy The Silence – Faderhead
- Strangelove – Lebanon Hanover
- Blasphemous Rumours – Skold
- Somebody – Hante.
- It’s No Good – Velvet Condom
- Never Let Me Down Again – Xiu Xiu
- World In My Eyes – The KVB
- Precious – Crying Vessel
- Just Can’t Get Enough – This Cold Night
- Everything Counts – Buzz Kull
- Heaven – Ashbury Heights
By now you’ve heard the buzz surrounding the new Depeche Mode tribute album, All I Ever Wanted – A Tribute To Depeche Mode, constructed by modern darkwave acts carrying the DM torch into the future, acts such as Scandinavian industrialists PRIEST, who released their cover of “Personal Jesus” in January, followed by former Marilyn Manson member Tim SKOLD whose version of “Blasphemous Rumours” landed the following month. Now, one of the biggest acts in modern electronic music, the internationally acclaimed duo LEBANON HANOVER, has released an ice-cold take on DM’s ode to BDSM, the darkly passionate “Strangelove.”LEBANON HANOVER’s well-regarded minimalist production style transforms “Strangelove” from an ‘80s dance club anthem into a chilly slice of sinister electronic perversion. Sung with a familiar, near deadpan tone by LH’s William Morris, the song’s repeated refrain “Pain, will you return it. I’ll say it again, Pain,” takes on an even more caustic quality and suffuses the entire track with a much more dramatic, modern edge than the 1987 original.
Morris proclaims “Doing the cover was a great honor, of course as Depeche Mode has had a profound effect on me since the first time I heard them. Growing up, the band was constantly by my side and ‘Strangelove’ was always a big favorite of mine. So it seemed obvious to select given that chance.”
The Wolfmanhattan Project
Summer Forever And Ever
In The Red Records
Vinyl Review By Jaime Pina
This release is from a weirdo collection of musicians and when you hear who is in the band it will raise a high bar as far as expectations. And this sounds exactly and thankfully like what you would think it would and should sound like. Featuring Kid Congo Powers (The Gun Club, The Cramps), Bob Bert (Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore), and Mick Collins (The Gories, The Dirtbombs) this record draws from the legacies of not only the bands but of the musicians themselves. All the qualities these great players brought to the great bands they were in are on display here. It is a perfect marriage. It is primitive, noisy, funky and it rocks as well as grooves and throbs and it just oozes with raw, sexy fun.
The cross-pollination of the different styles from Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit all meld in an impossibly beautiful way bringing together an anything-goes New Wave Theatre meets early CBGB’s meets Kick Out The Jams with a trash culture aesthetic so, of course, you will hear the occasional B-movie, Sci-fi sound effects scattered throughout. These songs would make the perfect soundtrack for a remake of Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster if one were ever made. The guitars are grinding, the drums are crashing and the vocals are assured. Yeah, this is exactly what you want it to be. And absolutely fantastic cover art by Kaz.
Night Plow (Tim Lefebvre and Gregory Macdonald)
Tuesday News
We Are Busy Bodies
Review By Chad C
Night Plow is the coming together of complete strangers Tim Lefebvre and Gregory Macdonald and on the 24th February, the duo are set to release their self-titled debut album together via the Toronto-based label, We Are Busy Bodies. Taking in influences including Kraftwerk, Andy Stott, Vangelis, Photek, Hans Zimmer, Radiohead, Undo K From Hot and The Avalanches, Night Plow is an insuperable symphony of 21st century sounds that crosses any music border.
They say, “never meet your heroes”. Well add to that, “never meet your collaborator.” Lefebvre and Macdonald both contributed parts to the 2021 critically acclaimed album ‘Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide To The Universe’ by New Age Doom and despite having never met in person and only speaking on the phone once, decided they shared enough common musical ground between them to step forward and start a brand new experimental project. Lefebvre would improvise beats and bass lines in his studio in Tuscon and then send Macdonald snippets of ideas which he would then edit into songs by adding synths and effects and then mixing them into more realized finished tracks. On the collaboration, Macdonald adds, “I was feeling the effects of Covid entering its second year and was getting a bit restless, and a long-distance collaboration with someone I’d never met but had great admiration and respect for seemed like the perfect thing to make it through the cold Canadian winter. I get excited by experimental music and trying new things, so I was pleased when Tim suggested we start a brand-new project. I loved what he did on the LSP/New Age Doom album and was thrilled when he liked the first thing, I sent him.”
Tracks like ‘Night Plow’ and ‘The Blackouts Of 1943’ have a frenetic, glitchy, and chaotic energy to them where bass and drums rule while ‘Just Wait Til I Get My Van’ has an early 80s soundtrack feel that echoes John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream. Elsewhere, ‘The Shame Parade’ fuses digital hardcore and noise rock with glitch-inspired production while the experimental ‘Crow Moving’ is an astonishing psychedelic mash-up of electronics, drone and post-industrial. The duo count Brian Eno, Pye Corner Audio and Nine Inch Nails as inspiration and their influence is never too far away across ‘Night Plow’. New single ‘$1.49 Day’ is a pulsing, pummeled mix of warming electronica and cyberpunk while ‘Get Down’, is a tumult of abrasive drums and digitized destruction before relative calm is restored with the mellowing album closer, ‘Tim Ruins Everything’.
Brutal Youth
Moonstones
Stomp Records
Review By Chad C
Toronto’s masters of melodic hardcore, Brutal Youth, have just announced the release of their anticipated new LP Rebuilding Year (due out April 21st on Stomp Records) with an advance single and video for the song Moonstones. The single calls to mind late 80’s and early 90’s West Coast punk, with hints of Big Drill Car, ALL, and Good Riddance scattered throughout. The melodic vocals of Patty O’Lantern paint a poignant picture of broken promises on top of a wall of guitars and a backbeat reminiscent of SNFU’s Jon Card and Belke Brothers era. Reminiscing on the meaning behind the lyrics for their first single Moonstones, singer O’Lantern says “ I was listening to a lot of Dag Nasty Can I Say at the time. This was inspired by Values Here in a lot of ways. Lyrically it’s a personal anthem about when the intimate promises we often make to the ones we love can just fall apart no matter how much we’re doing to try to hold them together. Thematically I think that’s in line with the entire record.” The album was recorded by Steve Rizun at Drive Studios in Toronto. Describing the studio situation, singer O’Lantern laments “his entire rig crashed on the first day we were scheduled to record, he probably spilled a bunch of orange Tang on it or something like that so basically DC, our drummer, drove four hours to eat a grocery store-bought salad with a raspberry vinaigrette and some chopped almonds and then go home.”
Brutal Youth play manic hardcore punk rock. They started out with three simple rules: play it fast; keep it under 90 seconds and don’t be precious about repeating a hook… because when your songs are that short people can always just hit rewind and play ’em again. Over a decade later they’ve broken every single one of those rules. On Rebuilding Year (their 4th long-player) we find the band once again breaking the rules and rewriting their own playbook. 14 songs that range from mid-tempo melodic sing-alongs, to blistering fast knockout tracks (some that even break the 3 minute mark) on a record all about dealing with personal ruination, redesign, and redemption. Rebuilding Year is the Brutal Youth’s most well-constructed and cohesive release to date. Tense and brooding about how life can grind you down into nothing, then melodic and resolute to make those necessary changes for the better because like they say “you get back what you put in.”