Philip Doyle

Rocky Road to Dublin   digital album

(Diablo Records)

Son of auld sod Doyley is exactly at home, amidst traditional airs smiled upon by comely Éiru. All stringed tools are handily plucked by the othertimes Psycho marauder. And his brogue calls up legions of hardy grandsires. May the road rise up to meet him.

Recommended: "Rocky Road to Dublin," "Wild Rover," "Tell Me Ma," "Craic at the Irish Rover," "Paddy O Doyle" 

No videos available, but here's Doyley/Shamcock's 2024 version of "Tell Me Ma"

Diablo Records

Bandcamp

headcat

...Plays Buddy Holly   red / yellow vinyl, CD, and digital

(Cleopatra)

Danny B Harvey on social media: "This album will be out on vinyl, cassette tape & CD worldwide May 15, 2026 on Cleopatra Records. I’ve remastered all the songs and added 3 unreleased alternative mixes that I did during the original sessions in 1999."

When Danny, Slim Jim, and Lemmy - renowned titans, all - cast fortunes into one jackpot, a supergroup of planetary capacity assumed configuration. Meat-and-potatoes, crasharound rocking was zested by the piquancy of gods.

But you already knew that.

Last month, Danny told Blabbermouth.net: " "I'm so excited this album is coming out, showing how important Buddy Holly was to Lemmy, Slim Jim, and I. We all love Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee and Little Richard, but as Lemmy said in his book White Line Fever, 'Buddy Holly never did a bad track, as far as I could hear.' I'm sure that's why our first album was mainly Buddy Holly songs."

Issued concurrently will be a digital EP, containing "Fools Paradise," "Peggy Sue Got Married," and "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" alternate mixes.

Since these words are being typed prior to the new disc's issuance, pesented below are links to Headcat's previous versions of songs to be included:

Recommended: "Fools Paradise," "Tell Me How," "Take Your Time," "Well...All Right," "Peggy Sue Got Married," "Crying, Waiting, Hoping," "Fools Paradise," "True Love Ways" (instrumental)"

Videos: "Fools Paradise" (live 2006)   "Take Your Time" (Fools Paradise LP adaptation)   "Peggy Sue Got Married" (fan-made video)   "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" (From Fools Paradise)   "Love's Made a Fool of You" (Fools Paradise)   "True Love Ways" (instrumental)

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Cleopatra

rarewaves

Juno

Discrepancy Records

jpc.de

Wanda Records

Automatic Lovers

s/t   12" vinyl and digital

(Wap Shoo Wap Records / FOLC Records)

Spring 1976: I tore shrink-wrap from the Ramones' world-rending debut Sire LP. And I didn't lift stylus from vinyl (except to flip the platter) until concluding "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World's" 2:09 had totally ebbed into ether.

Madrid's Automatic Lovers' maiden waxing recalls that pivotal episode. Not that the group is of identical rank - so, what band could claim that glue-sniffing distinction? - but because their record is equally solid. No tracks merit skipping.

Songs are grabbed up, shaken thoroughly, and booted into some future week. All are magnetic exercises in Punkishly frenzied, glad-to-be-young-and-kicking Rock'n'Roll, that is ardent enough to include guitar ferality amidst confederate raging, and sufficiently astute to maintain compositional brevity. 

1976 hype was that the debuting Ramones had blown out Plaza Sound Studios' speakers. I would not be flabbergasted to learn such had also been the case, here.

Recommended: "Wasting Time," "High Degree," "Pushin Too Hard," "Long Gone," "Out of Control," "Hardbeat," "WGTEYEO," "Shoot at Me," "What Do I Know," "Take My Hand," "Twist and Die"

Videos: "Wasting Time"   "Out of Control" (live)   "Pushin' Too Hard"   

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Wap Shoo Wap

FOLC 

Bandcamp

grooves.land

Soundflat Mailorder

Amazon

Apple

Dead Boys

Down on the Bowery from the Sleaziest Catacombs 

(Cleopatra)

Scheduled for unleashing on May 22, this combines earlier releases in Cleopatra's Dead Boys series - Down on the Bowery (vol. 1) and From the Sleaziest Catacombs (vol. 2). They are part of the label's DB series. Coming in summer: Time Warp Baby (vol. 3).

Fun diseases may well have crawled across both dysfunctional technicolor minstrels and the crude adherants before them, at Hilly's squalid, 1970s Punk Central dive. But the cerebellum-hacking barrage of sneering, swerving, and brutalism splashed graffitied walls with sufficient toxicity to eradicate infestations, no matter their horror story origins or appendage counts.  

Recommended: "Ain't Nothin' To Do," "Ain't It Fun," "All This and More," "3rd Generation Nation," "Dead and Alive," "What Love Is," "Search and Destroy," "High Tension Wire," "Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth," "Down In Flames," "Not Anymore," "Flame Thrower Love"

Video: live CBGBs, 1977 (28:51)

Cleopatra

Bandcamp

Latchkey Records

Josey Records

Vinyl Junkies!

Proper Music

Sonic Rendezvous

Amazon

Si Cranstoun

If a mad scientist with a bent toward coolness got hold of a Seeburg packed with stormy sides, and performed hep experimentation, zoot Si and the man's 18 Karat compadres might well materialize and jitter-bop across black-and-white tiles.

Video: "Jack and Jill"

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Taxi Girls

Who can slough off a demand for forthrightness, when it's hurled within chord-reeling smash-it-upism? 

Video: "Say It!"

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Stomp Records

Steve Hooker's guitar is on fire - again

England's Steve Hooker is every bit the genuine specimen. No pretender could boast his resume. In addition to producing a decades-spanning body of vibrant, sprawling solo endeavors boasting imperial bearing, he's gigged and recorded with pegged personages like Robert Gordon, Wilko Johnson, Boz Boorer, Johnny Thunders, and Levi Dexter.

It's not difficult to dissect the many-sired Rock'n'Roll roar that inspires earthy abandon and nocturnal, hip grinding hours. Blues, Country, and Rhythm and Blues each play prominently. Easier still to throw oneself into their combined mesmeric grasp. 

But wrenching such storms from six strings, with the blood familiarity Steve so obviously possesses, is hardly on common offer. And only the emphatically cubish would turn from opportunities to savor.

Last year, Steve remastered 2013's Smokin' Guitar. It's what those hip to the tip anticipated from the RockabillyBluesSoulMan, and his Stripped-Down Stompin' Band: gut punches from rugged Rock'n'Roll territory. A corrupting beat-trove of slide-guitared dirty fun, the way taboo Rock'n'Roll (in its varied and thorny/horny countenances) sounded in its early years. And the way that it can still come over.

"I can't play in any other way than what's true to me," Steve once confessed.

Bracing and hard-lashed, "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)," "Gospel Ground," "Steel Sedan," and "Wicked Blues" are but half of the disc's stouthearted examples of what ensues when someone with true, roots-music heart and soul plugs in.

All songs bounce and drive, crazily cool, sliding and swaying wonderfully in coarsely-grained rudeness. The rollicking blast is packed out by harmonica swipes bespeaking real-world experience. 

Think of basic, guitared-juggernauts of the sort the Rolling Stones gave up, back in the day. Or early Faces.

Steve agreed with that assessment, in years-ago conversation. "I think we all drink from the same well. Obviously the Stones draw on the whole history of American music and growing up in the fifties with the development of television. I was influenced by the same things."

"I guess this type of Rhythm 'n' Blues hybrid music became 'Mid Atlantic' when I was a kid - I can't and don't want to play or sing anything except what is deep inside of me.

"For instance I don't often refer to cars, automobiles or motorcycles except in passing because I don't have a drivers license. I wouldn't sing that I was born Mississippi - but I might write about a girl in Tennessee or Las Vegas because I just spoke to her by email. It's all around us."

Steve digs that it isn't only the raucous sound but the brash attitude, the way our music makes you live and love and yell and dance and feel -- inside and out -- that won't ever go away. Can't ever go away.

He won't let it.

Videos: "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)"    "Gospel Ground"   "Steel Sedan"   "Wicked Blues (Non-Filter)"

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