Outer Space
Nightwork
(Self-issued)
Should some lackwit aver that Ukraine lacks Psychobilly, flip open their cranium and install this with maximum force. Hurtling thrashstorms render language insignificant. Lock, load, and wreck till all around is wasteland. Continue wrecking.
Recommended: "Nichna robota," "Ibash," "Ne khochesh" "Pokynute misto," "Shepit vnochi," "Kathany," "Kris nich," "Sontsea liahaie," "Zalyshaieshsia tut"
Videos: "Nichna robota" "I Bash" "Pokynute misto" "Sontsea Liahaie"
Various Artists
Three Stars Tribute: A Tribute to Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, & the Big Bopper double LP
(Gold Label)
The reasons this tribute compendium hand jives in the winner's circle are three in number. 1) Blue-ribbon classics were selected for reinvention. 2) To a man, singers essaying admittedly formidable feats (the task of following kings' examples would cause most to shrink away), do so with remarkable talents of their own. 3) Backing, provided by Jason Guiterrez and the JG 3, all but leaps from speakers with dual-pipe Bel-Air energies.
ROCK'N'ROLL IS HERE TO STAY!
(Gatefold double LP comes with 20-page booklet, including recording session snapshots.)
Recommended: "La Bamba" (Sal Rodriguez), "Oh Boy!" (John Mueller), "White Lightnin'" (Sha Na Na)," "Stay Beside Me" (Frankie Avalon), "Paddi-Wack Song" (Jason Guiterrez), "Rave On" (John Mueller), "We Belong Together" (Ernie Reyes, Jason Guiterrez), "That's My Little Suzie" (Jimmy Angel), "Dooby Dooby Wah" ('Sting' Ray Anthony), "Fast Freight" (Kid Ramos, Jason Guiterrez), "Hi Tone" (Chris Montez)," "Big Baby Blues" (Kid Ramos), "Chantilly Lace" (Sha Na Na), "Everyday" (Marshall Crenshaw), "Hurry Up" ('Sting' Ray Anthony), "Ooh! My Head" (Johnny Ramos), "Malagueña" (Jason Guiterrez), "The Spirit Continues" (Jason Guiterrez), "Not Fade Away" (Marshall Crenshaw), "Maybe Baby" (Eddie Clendening), "Boney Maronie" (Jimmy Angel), " "Three Stars" (Pat Boone)
Videos: "Stay Beside Me" "Paddi Wack Song" "Fast Freight" "Hurry Up" "Three Stars"
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Karling and the Kadavers
Curse on Me EP
(Self-issued)
Title platter-gash races like a hearse up sideways on two wheels. Frantic, grim, and neck-snapping. Slap-bass prominent "Ruby" lopes, its cold tale of svelte vampirism cinematic in descriptiveness. (Somebody exhume Tura Satana and Al Adamson.) Slashing guitarwork is perpetrated by three practioners of villainy: Fuse, Watts, and Gator McMurder. (GM also wielded that mighty bass.) "The Worst of Me" concludes this dark endeavor, with Bermuda Schwartz hammering skins like they dared to look at him funny.
And Karling herself? She amazes with vocal cords that know no boundary and shake every note on the scale until it has Xs on its eyelids.
Recommended: "Curse on Me," "Ruby," "The Worst of Me"
Videos: "Curse on Me" (official video) "Ruby" "The Worst of Me"
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Back In the Day, 1975
The Dictators
...Go Girl Crazy!
(Epic)
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Some accounts of NYC's 1970s Punk explosion erroneously cite the Ramones' iconic 1976 Sire debut as its earliest platter. But these Bronx-stomping, metallically inclined prototypes beat da brudders to store racks, issuing their own initial wax in 1975.
Bassist and singer Adny Shernoff's wiseass junk-culture mini-anthems drew on classical Rock'n'Roll elements and remain bracing today. ("Oh, Weekend / Flashing Rock'n'Roll guitars / Cruising in my daddy's car / I do my homework in the bar!") The sadly departed Stratocaster / Les Paul juggernaut of Scott "Top Ten" Kempner and soloist Ross "The Boss" Funicello (né Friedman) imbued tracks with careening crunch. Propulsion came courtesy of Stu Boy King, his skins agility a decisive factor in the material's animation.
Producers Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman were unobtrusive, letting the reckless teen hijinx roar directly.
Posturing as an erstwhile pro grappler with scarlet spangled warm-up jacket, larger-than-life front man Handsome Dick Manitoba tore up club stages and bombarded audiences with inimitable gutter-blast vocals. (A contemporary Creem Magazine report noted the rip-roaring rabble-rouser once flung greasy french-fries onto stunned club goers, who dropped to their knees and stuffed their mouths.)
Though he sang only one song on The Dictators Go Girl Crazy, and shared vocals with Shernoff on several others, "secret weapon" Manitoba assumed more spotlight as time passed. Not surprisingly, given his outrageous presence and massive hairstyle, he became the group's enduring face.
Unfortunately, the pastiche of power chords and lowbrow humor failed to charm consumers. Sales figures were paltry - the Bronx group was just too niche for mass appetites. (Captain and Tennille's mawkish "Love Will Keep Us Together" topped Billboard's 1975 Hot 100.) Epic dropped the Dictators shortly following their debut's issuance.
(I interviewed Kempner by phone, upon the issuance of his post-Dictators band Del-Lords' maiden vinyl. When I told him I'd bought The Dictators Go Crazy when it hit shelves, he quipped dryly: "Oh, you're the one.")
The record's dash proved seminal, though, and many bands hip to the chemistry were influenced. Knowledgeable chroniclers hail it as a significant artifact.
Subsequent years saw additional releases by the Dictators, but the brass ring remained beyond grasp. Today, Handsome Dick Manitoba and the band pursue fortunes separately.
HDM's 2019 Born In the Bronx was reviewed here upon its release. The singer went on to issue 2025's triumphal Back on Broadway, proving Rock'n'Roll had indeed made a man of him; Notable was his clever way with a lyrical pen. The sunglassed brawler still contrived swaggering japes with the finest on offer. (See my May 2025 review.)
Recommended: "The Next Big Thing," "Master Race Rock," "Teengenerate," "Two Tub Man," "Weekend," "(I Live For) Cars and Girls"
Videos: "The Next Big Thing" "Teengenerate" "Two Tub Man" "(I Live for) Cars and Girls)"
Site (Manitoba)
Facebook (Manitoba fan page)
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Los Problemas
Oi!, Punk, Streetcore -- all roads lead to Rock'n'Roll. And it's in the neon night, when purpose, aimlessness, kicks, and ugly dangers thrive equally -- and bottles are uncapped -- that the echo of boots stomping on macadam smacks upside brick walls and slices carbonated ether.
Video: "Together Drinking on the Streets"
Last Wishes
Put a shoulder to the effort, and chuck a 40-ton semi off the skyskraper of your choosing; the concussive impact on the sidewalk far below will lend a notion as to the metallic splatter here in wax-groove bondage. Stay sick.
Videos: "The Only Answer" "Under the Hammer"
Haymaker and the rebel tradition
An examination of Rock'n'Roll's 1950s's origin points up the style's innate foreigness from divisive hate agendas.
Rock'n'roll was born from a multiplicity of racial and cultural idioms, including R&B, Hillbilly Country, Blues, Bluegrass, and Gospel. Proudly embracing that taboo diversity, it thrust its middle finger into the aghast mug of stilted, button-down propriety. (I speak here of the raw, original item, and not subsequent, commercially-cultivated simulacra.)
Remember that among rhetorical brickbats hurled at the burgeoning form by Officialdom were non-veiled racial ones like "jungle music." The White Citizens Council in Birmingham decried the "race-mixing" potential of the upstart sound's "raw, savage tone."
Among many other things, that attitude was stupidly intolerant. It's more than passing ironic, then, that some within the 2026 Rock'n'Roll community, having fallen for lazy mainstream journalists' kneejerk stereotyping of skinhead Oi! rockers, register equally high on the intolerance meter.
Meet the current bigot. Same as the old bigot.
For the uninitiated: One account holds that the skinhead movement was birthed in the 1960s, when ska-nodding Jamaican Rude Boys immigrated to England and blended with Rock'n'Roll-loving white working-class youth.
That multi-racial, populist upswell was later infiltrated by racists, sadly, and has since been falsely depicted by corporate media as institutionally hateful, malicious, and imbecilic. But neo-nazi dimwits were a miserable subset -- far away from the entirety and the punchclock sect's true essence.
But for fake-news wretches to actually do research and report complexities? Too much work, and unproductive to their preferred cultural narrative. Easier to unthinkingly crank out pre-formulated prejudices.
Haymaker are apolitical descendents of original skinheads. But, angry products of this crisper time, they bludgeon with two-fisted Punk.
The group rallies like-minded, workaday masses to boots-and-braces unity, and appeal to upholding unique cultural identity. ("You're a working man and you are proud of it / You get blamed for whatever, but you don't give a shit!," declares Tim Steinfort in a robust reading of Bohse Onkelz's 1986 "Stolz"/"Pride.")
Haymaker's shoutalong firebombs doubtlessly engender boulevard-marching, scalped choruses with fists thrust aloft. One hears a stomp battalion nearing.
Race-hate is entirely irrelevant; it doesn't even enter into the calloused-hands equation.
"Why do I have to put 'I hate racism' on my jacket," Steinfort once asked. "Every normal human being is against racism. I think also everybody knows that I'm not a racist...I say to left-wing extremists: 'Fuck you!' Because, of course I hate Nazis, but I hate left-wing extremists as well. And maybe more. And do you know why?
"Because, constantly, you're accusing me of being a racist. Well, you know I'm not. Instead of standing up, saying 'I know Tim, you can say what you want, but he's definitely not a racist.' Instead of that, you stay away from me, because of what other people think. Well, fuck you...
"Of course, when people wear Swastikas or 'White Power,' okay - get 'em the fuck outta here!"
Individuals like Tim thinking for themselves and rebelling against conventional judgements is entirely in the spirit that fired our music to begin with.
Which is a wordy manner of saying: Pretty fuckin' Rock'n'Roll.
Tim Steinfort on being unpolitical (9:46)
Videos: "Hooligan" "Haircut" "Proud" "Skinhead"
