W.A.S.P. - Babylon
Demolition

Like an alternate, spurious universe's embodiment of Bonodonna, Blackie Lawless here humbly appoints hisself ambassador for marrying, or marring, ancient myths with their modern day mirrors, valiantly tackling the beastly spectre of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And despite, or because of maybe, it sounding like quite a colossal dose of classic WASP, with some latter day idol-besmirching concept clutter coerced into typical positions, then it is likewise quite good but not exactly far-reaching. However, as in the past so in the present, for these positions aren't exactly compromising or explicit as all content is covered by strict pre-screenings in WASP's staple theatrical metal tenets, before surgery begins. No longer simply intent to arouse outrage in moral majority territory, modern day WASP's masterplan is to enforce relations with their tried, much-jested about but easily digested attack formations and such timeworn yet eternal metal concerns of good and evil. Never as barren of brain as his guitarists might have made him seem by their being in his band, Lawless can still seemingly toss off and crimp out metallic-pop anthems from the immortal blueprint of early Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister and KISS albums like a priest dispensing hail mary's. Tis a crusade positively bulging with trademark incandescent energy - once again they keep their ages old chaotic NWOBHM spark - with many a height soared and field marshalled to say the least, as the Lawless way with a shameless 'n shapely melody meets little resistance. With that peculiarly unique and passionate raven squawk masking the faux-philosophical lyrics until the choruses swoop low to distract attention slightly from the actual titles he's charring with his petrol-coated larynx...either that or it's when the ladies touch their knees and no-one can hear anyway. For here exists quite possibly the most banal bundle of song titles lumped together on one back sleeve ever. Burn, Into The Fire, Thunder Red (mis-heard Springsteen??) and Babylon's Burning. Hell, why not just shove Number Of The Beast in there too? And Seas Of Fire must have been etched on the hairy back of at least three album sleeves in 1982 alone. Cheerily though, as can be discerned, this doesn't affect the music muchly. Nooo, tisn't like they've taken their carefully considered consternation-causing moniker in vain with a Damascean exchange for the shock tactic of taking the serious stance, nor can it be described as an imaginative stride to go a-roaming down new alleys, dabbling in industrial stuff ten years too late like some old L.A. lags of Blackie's time. Despite Blackie's ultra distinctive voice and indiscreet charisma, though, it's ultimately an ephemeral and easily forgotten session. Of course none of it is comparable - though the first trident strike arguably could make good ground - to their days of cod-piece backfiring; beastalike fuck service; pyrotechnics by way of accidental hair-torching; PMRC- feminist-law flouting aaah the simple pleasures of a life that was solely L.O.V.E. Machine (need) vs Doctor (don't need); sleeping in fires while blind in Texas; wanting to be somebody, presumably because being seen as a hellion wasn't good enough for the ambitious bunch, it seems), and judged against most of the toss relentlessly yet aimlessly seeping and slipping out of the running to ascend the colossal, shite-stained, suppurating, rotten tit of an industry, striving to within sun cycles distance of the summit just to suck a piece of the putrefaction from the holy and wholly, slowly oozing cesspit, this holds a candle to them then scolds their faces off. So they're no longer ravenous shock tactic junkies and titillation but a solid bromide WASP-sody with an arid lack of dramatic tension in the titular area will far suffice over quite some dimension of the current musical climate. The grand galloping, gallivanting cavort with the Wonder Woman-twirling riff from Wild Child introducing Crazy (incidentally Seas Of Fire enters with a riff not unlike 9-5 Nasty), supposedly dealing with much darker themes than the love song setting it occupies, hmmmm, is possessed by one of those irrepressibly strident choruses comparable to those that seemingly dropped out of Blackie's BBC-approved ass-less pants in the above heyday, a trait that Live To Die Another Day (title??) takes on and verily trounces. That this even and easily survives a descent into Ronnie Dio domains on Babylon's Burning (though, admittedly it is of Long Live Rock'n'Roll) speaks volumes, well at least one notch. At nine tracks it appears pretty short, though all songs check in at around the five minute or so mark. One of the couple of inconsequential ballads, Godless Run (notable mainly as Into The Fire could be the bastard son of the debut's Sleeping In The Fire), should be cast adrift. The diabolically jolly and gloriously devil may care plunge through Elvis Berry's Promised Land is - surely implausible as a song that couldn't be enjoyed while seas swell and skies fall - suggests a hopeful end to the saga. Time will tell. 'It's easy to mock', so goeth the saying. Yes, but it's also easier to rock. And the sight of Mr World Apocalypse Saving Preacher bringing the four horsemen to heel would rock even more. Even if it did cause some sort of continental collapse.
Stu Gibson

Go Katz - Not Fair
Raucous

(Adopt Mike Read / Casey Kasem tones for this opening bit). Aaaaaaaannnddddd here we have us a-whoooshing up the unofficial Top something or other chart of Billy-bent renditions of regular chart hits, this malevolent makeover of mellifluous pop fluff Lily Allen's recent Top 40 tap Not Fair, from label boss Howard and cohorts. You might think it something of a novelty but if so then be surprised how often it works perfectly. Like here the right tune can herald pleasant turn of events when bossed and booted about in a stripped down bop pill fashion. P'raps young Lily should take heed, eh? Maybe a duet could be on the horizon. If you're a-wondrin' if the world needs another flick over the old Sun cherub Domino then the answer is a menacingly growled yeesssss. As is the blast through The Green Door, another fifties classic respawned in The Cramps garage (like Domino, sadly not Lily Allen) that will largely be ever-linked with Shakin' Stevens. This second EP from the recently reappeared Katz rounds off with a similarly grit-chomping rib-tickling trot through Matchbox's Gunning For The Dog. And, yupahoo, it sounds off like it's got a pair. They may be doing it for a bash, just cos they can but some of their own stuff would be innarestin'.
Stu Gibson

I'm Dying Up Here - Heartbreak And High Times In Standup Comedy's Golden Era
William Knoedelseder
Public Affairs

Coming from the novice reporter who documented the unfolding developments at their early seventies inception, when the stand-up profession rose quite considerably in stature and allure, from niche underdogs to the new rock'n'roll, leading to the still colossal multi-media dominion of several characters here, this fairly brief but compelling account of the rise of long-standing, or sitting in some cases, household names like Letterman, Leno and, erm, Williams has elements of a morality play and farce as well as sombre asides from life's less starry side of the galaxy. No National Enquirer et al type tawdry trek through participants lifestyle litterbins for this keeps a respectful distance while allowing the story to unfold accordingly as our heroes arrive at the West Coast, collectively make venues like The Comedy Store and the Improv into the hottest tickets in Hollywood wherein the dream descends into disarray. The first half or so outlines the varying degrees of success that the largely male throng attained, outlining characters and comic styles, relationships and driving forces, before stomping in allowing no time for an interval comes the second half and the late seventies battle with Comedy Store owner Mitzi Shore over her colossal earnings compared to the comics absolute zero. Shore used the argument of it being a showcase venue, thus weeding out those not good enough to step up to the next level and get paying gigs on the road or in Vegas as well as it bei ng her that started them all out. The coalition that formed to strike to ensure pay, especially for their junior comrades argued that it's the performer that brings the audience to the club. This tale and the debatable rights and wrongs will be familiar to many here, what with venues pulling similar and much worse for the higher money market of music but there's also the human element here of a group of friends or like-minded people in common cause being split, nay, rent, asunder by the encroaching spectre of fame and wealth that they all aspired to, with the possible attendant rampant egotism. In tragic Steve Lubetkin there's also the spectre that overshadows much in the field of striving for that break amidst the knock-backs, bad luck vs bad decisions and the age old hand of fate. A concise, effectively constructed and thought provoking look at a little heralded but ultimately important series of events in entertainment history, and one, thankfully, that doesn't attempt to jump in with a few jokes in keeping with its subject matter.
Stu Gibson

A Day In The Life - One Family, The Beautiful People & The End Of The Sixties
Robert Greenfield
Da Capo

For such a tabloid titillating title, this, perhaps expectedly by it's brawny boasts, is an incredibly slight tale from behind the scenes, tethered to the subject's eventual acquaintance with The Stones around their Exile period. The author was in attendance at Keef's famously dissolute garden of delights and despair on the French coast in summer 1972 and regaled us with that in his Exile On Main St : A Season In Hell With The Rolling Stones book. This present trawl through the vapid wreckage of the ultra-privileged and proudly pointless appears to be summoned from a scrap of paper in an old forgotten chest-of-drawers, the last exhausted detail from notes and memory. Centred on the supposed star-crossed love of aristocratic heirs Tommy Weber and Susan 'Puss' Coriat (Puss, as in cat who got the cream) it starts by outlining the complex, but ultimately irrelevant, ancestry of the two ill-fated centre-stagers, in tedious though obviously much-enthralled manner (Weber's grandfather - 'A fabulous character of the first order' gushes Greenfield - mangles one of his 'four extraordinarily expensive' motors with a pesky lamppost only to angrily harumph that there shouldn't have been a lamppost there anyway. How dare they, the impertinent plebs) then narrates the schooling, growing up in rural English pastures with names like Chilton Foliat, and society soirees and engagements of the two til they meet, attempt domesticity (even the note about his sitting on the shitter dictating to his family doesn't come across as the quaint eccentricity surely intended), split up, go off the rails - one eventually favouring suicide following unfortunate doses of acid self-psychiatry, the other - Weber - who the author is clearly in several thousand throes of hero worship to, regarding him as a rulebreaker, risktaker, iconoclast and individual, as though he's an equal to a Keith of the Richards or Floyd genus - descending into unsavoury smack habits (one interesting anecdotal snippet is his on needle-nodding terms friendship with Spacemen 3 in Rugby!!) including taping a rather large amount of coke onto his seven year old son (oh, the Medium actor Jake Weber) to smuggle through customs and largely living in the garbage bags of his fall from grace as a fair number of those 'remarkable' families do, the remarkableness of being born into wealth and indulgence dissipating their spirit as much as that of a council estate crack-slag with seven starving kids and as many pipes to feed or a life-long labourer with a paltry, if any, pension. The text is also irritatingly littered with incidents or people being 'like from' followed by some classic literary reference, presumably to emphasise the author's rapturous theory that this is a story befitting Greek mythology, Romeo And Juliet, Waugh, Fitzgerald or some Victorian tragedy. There's nothing new or interesting about the sections when Weber hung out with The Stones, the account of the 'young policeman' who found Puss being in tearful hysterics at the death of the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen is just pitiful and it is really very difficult to elicit even the scarcest shred of sympathy for these spoilt aristocrats.
As far as tomes with links to The Stones go, this is probably below Spanish Tony Sanchez' I Was Keith Richards' Drug Dealer. 'A Rock'n'Roll Tender Is The Night' stated his sometime employers at Rolling Stone. A slender is the reason to write say the non-enjoyers. Diasppointing, to say the least.
Stu Gibson

Brian Olive - Brian Olive
Alive Naturalsound

As Oliver Henry in The Soledad Brothers, Olive variously squatted at and straddled the Southern rock stomp Stax-sealed with a Stonesy swagger n' sway end of the garage-blues spectrum of the century's turn, or thereabouts. Here in this current manifestation he trades in some of that for some just as loose - loose as Iggy on quaaludes - psych-swaddled country-folk-funk like late seventies Alex Chilton in New Orleans, Syd Barrett leading the Memphis Horns on a merry jaunt under seventies Austin starry skies, even T-Rex and Todd Rundgren taking a freeform Greyhound trip chauffered by Skip Spence from San Francisco to jam with the Greenwich Village folkies as they're serenaded by Sly Stone. And it isn't a simple, lame-ass lama excuse to slide into 'hey, I took some mushrooms, check out my ragas' toe-contemplating of many second division and beyond no-marks. This is nothing short of a seemingly diffident but quietly resounding success. Not least as a step aside to slighter, slower, less stompy surfaces doesn't mean an aimless meander into sun-dappled, dope-addled Beatles, Bob, Grateful dreary Dead and bloody Neil Young terrain like many less-immersed in the still waters of song-smiting who take the style and forget, if they can even acknowledge, the soul as this multi-instrumentalist maverick.
Stu Gibson

The Sons of Hercules - A Different Kind of Ugly

The Sons of Hercules
A Different Kind of Ugly
Saustex

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when nobody’s looking. Texas’ Sons of Hercules have been plugging away for almost two decades with little notoriety beyond its Austin/San Antonio homebase, but the band is as lean and mean as ever, hammering out an ass-kicking punk rock record (that’s punk in both the 60s and 70s senses) every few years that reminds you why you dug ‘em in the first place. A Different Kind of Ugly is, well, not that different – it’s the band’s usual mix of firebreathing Britpunk energy with Flower Power-era garage riffs, topped by frontdude Frank Pugliese’s sneering twang. (Pugliese comes by his punk roots through experience: his old band the Vamps opened for the Sex Pistols in 1978 at the infamous Randy’s Rodeo “All you cowboys are faggots!” gig.) You want to frug and pogo at the same time? You could do worse that drop the needle on Too Much Fun, Startin’ to Slip or the title track. The 12-string laced Your Salvation gives you a brilliant power pop breather, and tunes borrowed from the Saints, the Lazy Cowgirls and the Mystery Dates (another of Pugliese’s long-gone historical combos) fit in like the band wrote ‘em themselves. Sure, the Sons have refused to evolve, but so what? No attention, no pressure, no muss, no fuss – just titanium-solid rawk & roll.

- Michael Toland

Hank Snow - When Tragedy Struck
Righteous

Christ almighty, the title of this little cherub is surely one of the most succinct examples of country music's well-tilled traditional stoicism for tragedy doesn't simply strike but bludgeon every inch of the already beaten to a blubbering n' bloody pulp with an emotional mini-gun, but that's just ploughing the field for battles anew. It is however, possessed of much macabre enchantment, as such things usually are, dark drama's cradled with sorrow that never descend into the mawkishness that maketh mirth outta cow'n'tree wonky tonkin' music, with the rawhide rough-hewn humility and pathos as though grimaced out by Josey Wales to a soft-step backing of honky-tonk hymnals. A Drunkard's Child is classic tear-rimmed balladry as is the father / son tale of Don't Make Me Go To Bed And I'll Be Good, The Convict And The Rose like an older sister of Merle Haggard's Sing Me Back Home. This album also has, hell it had to have it on, surely, Old Shep on it that Elvis had brought to torrential national tear-fest a few years earlier, and later on another farewell to four paws on Little Buddy. As a forbear of Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt this cheerful chapter shouldn't be discarded in a little plot on it's lonesome, being a worthy historical document from a time when babies grew up to be cowboys not crybabys. It even ends with a surprising twist, at the wake perhaps, on the sprightly jig of I'm Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail.
Stu Gibson

MOB - The Greatest Enemy
MOB

Oooh eck, a seventh slop of sub-'87 Saxon out-takes lathered in classic euro melodicism anyone? Disappointingly shoddy fare from the mightily molten rock lava-lands of Sweden, beyond trite lyrics and telegraphed guitar to boot plus unlimited edition extra portions of being almost totally devoid of personality. As Fredrik Notling himself notes, with rare gusto, perhaps appropriately, on Life - 'Have you ever considered something / You might be throwing your life away / Do you really seize the moments / Are they wasted or gone astray'. Unsatisfied us both then matey, you've trawled through seven albums and about a decade and a half and I've just squandered about twenty minutes having a break from reading and waiting for my beans n' rice to coagulate and one of us might get paid for it. Bon chance!
Stu Gibson

Last Stop China Town - Into The Volcano
Fool's Paradise

And so it came to pass that not all metal of the new breed verily broadswording it's merry way out of Britain's bulging bile ducts numbered beast-slayers and lightning-riders in the traditions of the revered old guard. Maybe tis to be expected for the wayside is full of errant wanderers who easily strayed from the narrow paths of righteous volcanic riff venom. As one all for the re-emergence of good old anthemic boy's own metal rising against the nu-metal then emo hordes this is, disappointingly, far too unimaginative for all it's guts n' grit. While there are some pounding passages from Mechanical Sunrise's impressive starting-block disintegration onwards, this never raises the temperature and is a workman-like slug up a hillside, but more the Halesowen cribbage society's monthly hike to the chippy than a Hamburger Hill. If it was simply battle-ready bravado we were measuring this gets bogged down in marshy terrain leaving itself stranded as sitting targets for sniping practice. This bunch of Midland's marauders never venture beyond the mid-eighties mid-league of Maiden and early Metallica cannon-fodder. It could be a pastiche if it weren't so clear they're really striving though valiant efforts count for nothing when you've an army beleagured by trench-foot and lack of ammunition, even at times the wrong calibre for the weapons they do possess in working order. A perfect example of the ages old aphorism about sweat and inspiration and a salutary lesson showing how difficult effective thrash is to, like, totally execute. There's been a comment or two about their name in contrast to the defiantly trademark thrash symbolism of the rest of their branding, but as a moniker that could be listed in the Racing Post at the 4.15 at an all dayer in Halifax then this bunch are clear also-rans. Alas, not even close enough to catch a glimpse of the pearl-handled pistols never mind catch a whiff of the cigar.
Stu Gibson

Lydia Lunch - Big Sexy Noise
Sartorial

In which Ms Lunch again rallies some grinder men of her own by tempting a coterie of Gallon Drunketeers from their various rackets, soliciting the baddest, seediest secretions to coagulate then hawking up these twelve outstanding steps to a maliciously entrancing enmity fetish. Summoning the aura of a fetid, inner city dystopia like a leisure park of depravity from Ballard or Burroughs this dark, seething, sordid soiree delves into lairs of urban blues dredged from steaming sewers of monolithic Stooges thunder-drones, freeform granite-crunching funk-clank and gargantuan slabs of swaggering mantras in swirling maelstroms stampeded and strafed by scattershot shards of saxoskronk and sheets of Hammond - opener Gospel Singer is surely the closest a quartet can ever come to resembling a blitzkrieg, with piercing Stuka sax and pulverising Panzer rhythms. Amid the tempest, El Lydia berates, taunts, lectures, teases and tempts, spitting out vitriolic ripostes and sarcastic adieus alongside sinister subterranean narratives of grimy southern gothic, warped religion and skewed psychiatry of Slydell, Diggin The Hole and that opening onslaught. Those serrated kiss-offs come in the slinky though ferociously scorned forms of Another Man Comin (while the bed is still warm) and Your Love Don't Pay My Rent that both recall Marianne Faithfull's Why D'ya Do It? and with the egregiously glorious stomach-mushing sludge of Doughboy, get the immediate repeat prescription form. Occasional sections get stuck in the quagmire like near detour into indie-dance straits on Dark Eyes and Charles Manson-themed God Is A Bullet and if the short n' sultry horny moll lament Bad For Bobby (a slight taste, or light lunch perhaps, of Morphine) or the menacingly churning grind of ecstatic hip-swivel turning into grimacing limb-trimming of Baby Faced Killer seem to slide past with no cause for concern, care not. This is a noisy and sexy, yes, but also succinct and sardonically successful colliding grind of the GD brigade's musical armoury as chartered by LL's scabrous personality all channelled through what is now her rasp of acerbic, cantankerous disdain making her some sort of scary grotmother of Royal Trux / RTX's Jennifer Heartmurmer. (And talking of Royal Trux, incidentally the scab-pick over Skynyrd's That Smell - re-christened Smell Of Death here), joins das Trux Deluxe duo's salt-wound of Theme From M*A*S*H and Money For Nothing in the uncrowded closet of classic cover versions.) Cataclysmic, apolcalyptic, coruscating, corrupting and, hopefully, quite possibly, not, considering the steaming cauldrons of still scarcely contained malice here, climactic.
Stu Gibson