rock

Three days, no brakes, something to celebrate. That’s the state I’ve found myself in after constantly playing King Salami & The Cumberland Three. This is what music is all about: Transcending barriers that are put up by the music snobs.

How the hell do you get a Japanese punk joining forces with a French punk and then finding a Caribbean tennis teacher for oral scintillation? Then they come up with a name that covers a love of sausages, calling themselves “the best party band in the British Isles” And they pull it off. How?

The answer is Music, pure delightful music. Music that you dance to. Music that you can surf to. Music that you can chop wood to. Pure music.

Back in in the headier days of the early '90s, I used to laugh out loud at those bands who used to churn out albums duplicating Ramones discs. Now the Ramones are dead (for the most part) and gone, do we need an Australian version of the same thing?

These four tracks on a 7” EP are from four members of the crew of U47, a German submarine that lay frozen under ice for 60 years only to re-surface, no doubt as a result of global warming. That the crew-members sailed up the Brisbane River and were washed up in the live music pubs is a stroke of luck, because local label Swashbuckling Hobo has been able to issue their vinyl.

I was a fan of Sonics/Seeds/Shadows of Knight-inspahrd garage grunt right up until the moment when the likes of the Hives (My new favorite band? Not likely, pal) and the execrable Jet arrived on the set – which coincidentally was around the same time I started running, not walking, away anytime some SXSW shill offered me a new band’s CD-R that sounded “just like the MC5!” It seemed to me that the whole trip was starting to sound not just stale and derivative, but even a tad bit formulaic. What to do, then, but recede back into my bunker with my Boris and Ornette Coleman records? But The Barman pulled my coat to these guys, and the Barman is an honourable man.

What is it about Michigan rock bands releasing debut albums 30 years after they were regularly working the live circuit? The Ramrods did it a few years back and The Seatbelts, now well and truly reformed, continue in the same vein. Contemporaries of the similarly non-prolific Sonic's Rendezvous Band, they've unleashed "Joy Ride" onto an unsuspecting public with rock and roll seemingly in its death throes. Maybe, just in the nick of time.

One man's Mantovani is another man's "Theme From M*A*S*H*" so I just want it known that Bob Short's review below is a tad harsh. "Just Want To Be Friends" isn't as good as "Four Flights Up" but it ain't a pile of steaming donkey turd either.

Kevin K's nailed what he does. And that's make monstrously good rock and roll records. If you agree and you're a fan, pride yourself in the knowledge that you've found out what the rest of the world has yet to.

The odds were stacked against Leadfinger delivering two killer albums in a row but only a fool would have laid down their readies against him. Here's 11 songs of blues-rock swagger with classic influences, all processed through Stew Cunningham's personal musical blender.

The more I hear of Keith Urban and Kasey Chambers, the more it's apparent that they have nothing to do with what anyone should consider to be country music. They arei hospital strength disinfectant-treated confections, aberrations so far removed from the original form so as to be irrelevant. Their records are turds polished within an inch of their sorry lives for moronic masses wearing shit-eating grins. A snob's view? People like Dave Favours come along and you know your opinion counts.

It’s their fifth studio album and it’s tempting to say the lines have become blurred between Nunchukka Superfly and the Hard-Ons, from which two of its three members are drawn. That’d be convenient but also wrong.

Glad you asked. It's sharp and urgent rock ’n’ roll played by four old heads from Central Scotland who sound like they mean it. If Cheap Trick wore kilts, ate haggis and were hard to understand after 10 pints they’d be The Media Whores.

Hey, this kicks ass, these guys are really stoopid and really good. There's a fuckin' excellent balance here; they have TONS of Australian attitude (a la Cosmic Psychos, Onyas), mainly in the lyrics. And, musically, they run right over Motorhead - but in their own car (they're not just copycats).

A few people have a problem with Screamin' Stevie's brand of idiosyncratic garage-soul - and that's fine. You can't please all of the people all of the time and Stevie ain't no choirboy. But it's the fact that sometimes (vocally) this Brisbane veteran can't carry a melody to save his life that's at the heart of his artfulness. Putting this quirkiness to one side, most of "She Just Likes To Dance" is poppy garage prime-time.

Here’s a bucket of snarly garage punk from Houston, Texas, with all the right sounds and attitude. Ragged and insistent, Born Liars rages against whatever slips into view in the gunsight and takes it down with a sonic hollow-point.

Here’s a taste of the forthcoming studio album by garage rock pioneers the Sonics. Recorded at Seattle's Soundhouse Studios with killer producer Jim Diamond behind the controls, It will be their first LP release since 1980 and first album of all-new material since 1967.

The album will be accompanied by a US tour (check our Living Eye section at right for dates.)   

Punk rock icon Sonny Vincent is in the middle of a family tragedy and desperately needs your help.

His son Robert Ventura, daughter-in-law Sarah and nine-year-old grandson Cayden are on life support in a North Carolina hospital after a gas fire engulfed their home.

Sonny has flown in from his own home in Germany with only the clothes on his back and is on a bedside vigil. 

A GoFundMe crowdsourcing campaign has been established to help the family here. A benefit show in NYC is also in the pipeline.  

Sonny is a former member of seminal punk band The Testors and has a long and storied career as a solo artist, collaborating with the creme de la creme of the underground rock scene. 

https://www.gofundme.com/xnvynbcc

Here's an album with more faces than the Devonshire Street tunnel has buskers at Xmas rush hour. It's the first full LP for Sydney's Dunhill Blues and Multiple Personality Disorder rarely sounded so much fun.

You think those Powderfinger guys suddenly became Australia's hardest-working band during their farewell tour? Meh, Think again. The Dunhill Blues play miniscule stages by comparison, but their work ethic makes that of those safety-first blowhards look positively non-existent.

This marriage of the Kings of Aussie Grog Rock fits like a proctologist’s finger in your bum. The Vee Bees serve up four high-speed hammerings of dubious lyrical content like “Never Miss The Bowl”, while The Meatbeaters come up with two slabs of particular intensity characterised by stinging guitar.

They're not supposed to make records this good anymore. The scenario's familiar: Eighties underground band with all the right roots re-animates and attempts to re-capture their past by pushing out a new album to the converted, right? We've seen it happen with ever-increasing frequency. Only this time it works.