DiabloGato
Snake Oil Salvation
(Rum Bar Records)
It wouldn't surprise if these maulers' mugshots adorned post-office bulletin boards. Elements of open-throttle Rockabilly snake through Punk furiousness that sneers its coldness toward virtue. Upon listening closely, one discovers that darkly sophisticated wordplay elbows space in this land of advanced intrumental furor.
Recommended: "Heaven's Gate," "Fire and Powder," "July 1969," "Lost Highway"
Videos: "Fire and Powder" "Lost Highway"
Rose and the Maddox Brothers
The Truckers Jukebox Present...
(Burn Rubber Recordings)
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So storied is the quintet facing us that introduction would be squandered wordage. Their fetching way with European-birthed melodies filtered through humble American Southern experiences romped spiritedly. Accents and cultural inclinations imbued old airs with affable hay-bale audacity. The jocularity that often winked from between bouncing barnyard rhythms wreathed faces in ear-spanning grins. Rose and her brothers were in the midst of Rockabilly's proletarian genesis.
Recommended: "Ugly and Slouchy," "I Gotta Go Get My Baby," "No Help Wanted," "I Wonder If I Can Lose the Blues This Way," "Wild Wild Young Men," "Paul Bunyon Love," "I'll Make Sweet Love To You," "Hey, Little Dreamboat," "Stop Whistlin', Wolf," "I Gotta Woman (the Death of Rock'n'Roll)," "A Short Life and Its Troubles," "Did You Ever Come Home," "I'll Go Steppin', Too," "My Little Baby," "I've Got Four Big Brothers," "False Hearted," "Looky There Over There," "You Won't Believe This"
Video: live (:26) "Ugly and Slouchy" "No Help Wanted" "Wild Wild Young Men" "Hey Little Dreamboat" "Stop Whistlin', Wolf"
Ichi-Bons
"Get Away" / "Heart Attack" 7" or digital
(In collaboration with Ugly Pop)
Ripsaw fleetness. This Toronto Garage-Punk three stormed across May stage flooring alongside English hearties The Damned, and their newest is limited to just 400 black-vinyl copies. As difficult as it may prove to secure one, then, the greater challenge will be convincing lucky turntables to relinquish it. (Assuming anyone would be so inclined.)
Video: "Get Away" (live)
The Granite Saints
Union Jacked UK Mix!
(Self-issued)
Four agitators join shoulders and raise ruckus that staggers. Spitting-mad bar-chords slam past one another as tempos race under relentless whip. At the onrush's core huffs tunefulness that makes no apologies for stabbing brains.
Recommended: "Bloody Valentine," "Til the Day I Die," "Red Hill Ghosts," "The Real Enemy"
Video: "Red Hill Ghosts" (live)
The Brains
"Evil" single
(Cleopatra)
Like being thrown down concrete steps into a dungeon and digging each contusion. Abetted by similarly focused-on-mayhem cohorts, Rene De La Muerte haunted studio circumstance to wreak an unsettling monster-season manifesto. Ever relished in his songcraft is near-claustrophobic architecture's hurtling on febrile bat wings.
Back In the Day, 1965
Del Reeves
...Sings Girl On the Billboard LP
(United Artists Records)
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Bird-dogging may be less conspicuous now than in Opry icon Del's heyday, but biological compulsions endure unmitigated. (Without them, I wouldn't be writing these words and you wouldn't be reading them.) Winking tracks loped in a season when flirtations were acknowledged as compliments. (Del followed this with the jocular "Women Do Funny Things To Me.") The steer-horned and chrome-festooned drop-top in which Del's chuckling rakishness cruised was as first-chair as any Nashville offered. Such was their Country-fried succulence that these songs populated innumerable truck stop jukes. (On Amazon, the unopened platter is priced at $201.00.)
"They say that hemlines are gonna be much shorter this year / That sounds like mighty sweet music to my ear. I wouldn't have you to thinkin' I'm the wrong kinda guy / I just sorta got an eye for the finer things in life."
Recommended: "Girl On the Billboard," "Eyes Don't Come Crying To Me," "Strangers," "Three-Time Loser," "Nothing To Write Home About," "Belles of Southern Bell," "I've Got a Tiger By the Tail," "I'm a Long Way From Home," "The Race Is On"
Video: "Girl On the Billboard" / "Belles of the Southern Bell" (live on 1965 TV)
The Bullet Biters
Serial Drowner 7" 3-song EP
(Bad Billy Records)
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With two decades in their past, Finland's Bullet Biters perpetrate so sharply as to crush lessers. Bursting forth is neo-Rockabilly transmogrified into beastliness. Experience shouts its worth. The triad nimbly executes unanticipated switch-ups, stomping in creature creepers. Cuts were drawn from a forthcoming full-length release; Bad Billy advises just 200 black-vinyl copies of this sampler will feel buyers' hands.
Recommended: "Serial Drowner" (At presstime, only this track was available for study.)
Video: "Serial Drowner" (live)
Rocky Kaminski
Live! From the Garbage Truck
(Crabatodia)
"A thrilling apocabilly Jazz experience," gasps the Bandcamp account of this experimentalism gone gaga. Theremin hitches with a standard lineup, traversing territories mysterious. Striking among luring attributes are saxophone weavings (that sometimes, curiously, evoke visions of betasselled flying carpets circling Pluto) and, well, unnerving throat histrionics. Crunched guitar shards wallop. Ensemble players of such caliber they've opened for Reverend Horton Heat and the Koffin Kats. Magnetically eccentric.
Recommended: "Star Cruise," "Sleepin' on the Side of the Road," "Undead King," "Garbage Truck," "Philornis Fly," "Bottonless Pit"
Video: "Sleepin' on the Side of the Road" (live) "Philornis Fly" (live)
P. Paul Fenech
Happy Halloween IX 10" EP
(Mutant Rock Records)
Where matters concern P. Paul, there exist no consequence confusions. The Meteors' visage excels at dastardliness. Tracks weren't available for early consideration, as this 500-copy disc's issuance is timed for portentious All Hallow's Eve prefacing. But P. Paul's antecedent efforts all manifest his brick hammer-finesse and predilection for motifs disquieting. This writer feels assured touting new maraudings unheard.
Recommended: "The Thirteenth Chime," "You're Dead," "Ghost Mountain," "Funeral for a Saint (Muerte en Octobre)"
Videos from prior Happy Halloween VIII: "Gimme Gimme Halloween" "All Hail the Pumpkin Head (King of Halloween"
Philip Doyle
Slingers Duo - Stayin' Alive digital album
(Diablo Records)
Testament to the yowling pair's capacity is that they salvage "Stayin'Alive," the Bee Gees' atrocity that (at least in this precinct) always provoked regurgitation. One is floored by the spectacle of Philip Doyle's and Jeanmi Arnould's digits tearing up and down fretboards. Fold in their beer-hall voices thundering in jollification, and the admixture intoxicates.
Recommended: "Jim Dandy," "Seven Deadly Sins," "Big River," "Staying Alive," "I Love Rock'n'Roll," "Gone Gone Gone"
Video: "I Love Rock'n'Roll" (Mecrin France) private show (2:11) tour promo (1:04)
Al Foul
Come Back a Dog
(Fort Lowell Records)
"I think the reason everybody loved him was that he was a really good person," fellow Tuscon musico Ben Nisbet revealed to a reporter, as the ill tiding of 50 year-old Al's cancer death spread through May 2022. "He was the person who had an incredibly strong sense of integrity and a remarkable moral compass."
The troubadour's austerity is conveyed here to high effect. (He'd traveled considerable distance from his teenage stint with Boston punks Foul-Mouthed Elves.) The title cut imprints plaintiveness. From subtle onset, American standard "Frankie and Johnny" swells into feverishness. "All In the Name of Love" kicks up heels with abandon. And Dave Dudley's "Six Days On the Road" prospers from Al's offhand, bar-stage tack.
That he produced this, ensuring his vision was honorably inscribed, rates as proper. All monuments should be so faithful.
Recommended: "Come Back a Dog," "Darker Shade of Blue," "Memphis," "Frankie and Johnny," "All In the Name of Love," "Six Days On the Road," "Down Hill"
Video: "Come Back a Dog" "All In the Name of Love"
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Zabilly
Acenei e Sorri
(Self-issued)
Following the route of previous Zabilly outings, last July's resounding "Seca Sovaco" emlazoned the three as redoutable mongers of sounds indomitable. Comes now "Acenei e Sorri," neo-Rockabilly whose brawn sneers at barriers. Red lights are as nothing to cats perpetrating jitter bop.
Al Duvall with The Freaks
The Flop Sessions
(Flop Records)
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Al recorded as "Tough Ted Titmaus" in the early 1980s. The later Flop Sessions is all but invisible online, though, and these tracks' birth year is indeterminate. But whatever their vintage, they portray him cannily wedding wise-cracks to pre-war percolating, and cleverness is evergreen. The old-fangled ditties are of roll-back-the-rug disposition. Playfulness facilitates japery: "Buck Up," the wag advises, even "When you're soaked in gasoline, and you run into an old flame."
Recommended: "Buck Up," "The Killer Inside," "Miner Blues"
Video: live in 2010 (2:33)
Krystal Jyl and the Jacks
"Hot Dog!" EP
(Tenvolt/Stephen K. Donnelly)
Bored teens dawdled over their malteds. But when one leather-jacketed kid fed the blinking Seeburg and crazy riffs buoyed by the Big Beat blared, couples tore into motion. Sideburned shop-class skip-outs and pony-tailed Betties whirled across scuffed black-and-white tiles. Rock'n'Roll is here to stay.
Recommended: "Clothing Swap," "The One That Got Away," "Hot Dog Roller at the Seven-Eleven"
Video: "Clothing Swap"
Amazon (UK)
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Hombre Lobo Internacional
Let's Do It!! EP
(Lumpen Creativo)
Nothing scant of face-ravaging could be anticipated from a self-mantled "one Wolfman band," nor are such expectations dashed. A likely theory submits his sinister command of multiple instruments owes to lunar projections. Maleva knows his way is thorny.
Recommended: "Let's Do It!!," "Gotta Fade Away," "Never Been Loved"
Videos: "Gotta Fade Away" "Never Been Loved"
Back In the Day, 1994
Hank Flamingo
s/t
(Giant/Warner)
As the Tuff Darts lamented, you can't sell something if it hasn't been sold before. Hank Flamingo (a band, not an individual) produced one LP that captured its olio of traditional Country, Rock'n'Roll merriment, and sideways 'alternative' adventurism. It was home-style good and sporadically quirky. "Little Miss Fire Prevention" and single "Baby, It's You" romped with familiar dirt-road mischievousness, their fiddle and six-string interplay of back-country blood. But "Tennessee Plates" and particularly "Redneck Martians" (which cultivated idiosyncratic visage) employed tilted sonic effects, locating them at a distance from Nashville proper. Label marketers surely had a stern go. Audiences groomed to applaud orthodoxy were nonplussed. Regardless, much fun was had by those without rigid demands.
Members atomized the following year. Drawling and baggy-suited frontman Trent Summar, whose freewheeling demeanor portrayed affability, formed Trent Summar and the New Row Mob. Over years, the group featured Flamingo guitarist Philip Wallace, as well as eminent picker Kenny Vaughn (McBride and the Ride, numerous ensuant marquee-name associations, and Marty Stuart's present band). Others included Michael Granda (Ozark Mountain Daredevils), and Dan Baird (Georgia Satellites). Two platters were cut for Palo Duro.
Earlier this month, Trent led the Trent Summar Band in performing at the California Avocado Festival. He is also the "boss man" of Farm Rock Music Publishing.
Recommended: "Little Miss Fire Prevention," "Baby, It's You," "When You Ran With Me," "Tennessee Plates," "White Lightnin'," "Redneck Martians Stole My Baby," "Slaw"
Videos: bio and "Baby, It's You" (13:11) "Redneck Martians Stole My Baby"
Facebook (Trent)
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The Franklin County Trucking Company
The Death-Defying Adventures of...
(Tri-Nut Records)
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Fcotco looses barnburning jolt with clod-kicking inclinations, and does so with assurance that can only be earned through hardscrabble toil. Figures associated bespeak hat-doffing timber. Members include Jim Rotramel and Taylor Sprehe of Number 9 Blacktops Rockabilly fame, Supersucker Eddie Spaghetti, and flat-out drum-killer Sean Hopkins. (Most tracks were penned by either Rotramel or Hopkins.) Additional luster is lent "Me and Mr. Pibb" by erstwhile Del Lords plank-spanker Eric "Roscoe" Ambel. Owing to executive-level production, Fcotco's fourth release shouts with serrated definition.
Recommended: "Bless My Soul," "Shotgun Ghost," "Bobtail," "Truck Drivin' Rock'n'Roll Songs," "Raise Hell, Praise Dale!," "Ain't No Duke In Paducah," "Rollin' On," "Me and Mr. Pibb," "Work Hard, Be Humble"
Video: "Truck Drivin' Rock''Roll Songs" "Rollin' On"
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Ferlin Husky
Essential Classics, Vol. 558
(Essential Classics)
As they were Ferlin's deepest etchings on sales charts, "On the Wings" and "Gone" were obvious selections for inclusion. His pew-testimonies and heartsore ventures portrayed somber aspects. But more appealing to some fans (including this reviewer) were brassy high-steppers that showcased impeccable 1960s Country electric and steel-guitar masteries, and Ferlin's own loose and broadly grinning relatability. When the limber-limbed, Missouri-born caller reared back and belted out "I feel better all over more than anywheres else!" (as he did in 1966 film Las Vegas Hillbillys), everyone knew to believe him. Were Ferlin confronted by one of today's woke Pop-Country manikens, he would clean bust a gut.
Recommended: "Wings of a Dove," "I Feel Better All Over," "Gone," "Tennessee Central Number 9," "Prize Possession," "Detour," "I Wouldn't Treat a Dog Like You're Treating Me," "I Will," "I'll Never Have You," "Very Seldom, Frequently Ever," "The Drunken Driver," "How Much Are You Mine"
Video: "I Feel Better All Over" "I Wouldn't Treat a Dog Like You're Treating Me" "The Drunken Driver"
Lasse Edin
"My Sunshine" single
(Talking Music)
The Playtones
"Hoppin' and Boppin'" single
(Atenzia Records)
Finned Bel Airs, Delta 88s, and Buick Roadmasters were parked at crazy angles. The house rockin' could be heard clear down the block. Jaunty Rock'n'Roll drove tattooed celebrants into a delirium beyond that to which Schlitz and Falstaff had already opened the door. And the Playtones got it all down on tape.
The Dead Beat Jacks
Graveyard Chicks Are Easy
(Jax-Wax Records)
Perhaps it's because these lunar-bayers have been occupied with onstage lurkings (including with Hillbilly Casino), that 2021's Graveyard Chicks has thusfar remained their sole full-length waxing. But a crisp platter will soon loom. And in the present time, sordid relish of monster melodies here gushes unspeakably. Once you've entered, the door will slam behind you. It only opens from the outside. You won't care.
Recommended: "Psychobilliac," "Before I Lose My Mind," "Graveyard Chicks Are Easy," "Scary Truck," "Baddest Cat In Town," "A Undying Quest," "Bone Stimulator"
Videos: "Psychobilliac" "An Undying Quest" live in 2023 (24:11)
The Altar Billies
"Ridin' On the Santa Fe" single
(Self-issued)
So solid a Country-shaded Rockabilly proposition are Orange County's Altar Billies, they were invited to stomp the stage at last month's Roots Music Festival in Westminster. Theirs is a rollicking interpretation of the American Rebel Music that, when first ripe, shook popular culture to its foundation. Impeccable Gretsch picking and sleek harmonizing cruise compellingly to a gingery backbeat.
"The legendary Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway is considered by many to be a 'Fallen Flag' railroad that might be gone, but is not forgotten," wrote the limber-legged trio, in a Facebook post. That precious memory now has a theme song.
Billy Irwin & the Gambits
If the Shoe Fits...
(Revivalist)
I was unaware of rough gem Billy, prior to hearing of this. His irrepressible acoustic, unvarnished singing, and song-writing flair mark him as especially gifted. Initially, I'd been moved to investigate by the participation of picking phenomenon Bart Weilburg (who previously backed Wayne Hancock). Bart's prowess proved only one facet of a Honky-Tonk treasure. Also at Billy's elbow was fiddler Flora Knight. Without her peppery sawing, considerable vitality would be absent. Additional heft was lent by guest hay-bale minstrels. All involved seem to be having a whale of a time, making rafters rattle.
On Intagram, Knight wrote: "Billy writes a fine song, and from a very genuine place. What you see is what you get...The album is Country as hell..!"
Recommended: "Thorn In My Side," "I'll Find It Where I Can," "Sober and Lonesome," "My Sweet Love Ain't Around," "T For Texas," "Can't Go Back to Oklahoma," "Dad's Song," "Slow Walkin' Slow Talkin'"
Videos: "Thorn In My Side" "Sober and Lonesome"
The Nightdrivers
"You're the One" single
(Rehn Music Group )
Every quality this song possesses, charms. Against gentle acoustic strums, a swain (assumedly on bended knee) plights his troth to a Heaven-sent woman he caresses with poesy of adoration: "You're the one meant for me / I am so lucky as a man could be." The pillow of melody upon which our hero's whispered devotion is offered comforts as it encourages.
Amazon (US)
Amazon (Au)
Greaser Phase
s/t
(Shambotic Recordings)
This was still cooling when Shambotic gave up the ghost. Undeterred, the NYC guitar/vocals duo of Benny Imbriani and Jonny Crouch are soldiering forward. (The two benefit here from the in-pocket assistance of drummer Kevin Shea.) Influences are robustly embraced and thrown into textured melange: Keef riffs chime with classic Rock'n'Roll's carbonated jubilance, compelling singing etches personality, and even Pop happens by to bestow mellifluous wonderment.
Recommended: "Lonely Hearts Killer," "Back In California," "Believe It," "Love Is Guaranteed," "False Paradise," "Over and Out"
