The Martians

First Landing   digital album

(Self-issued)

Rock'n'Roll as originally fashioned has no expiration date. Introductory cut "On Your Balcony" cruises straight through, its 1950s-modeled energy good-natured and the song narrator an aspiring Romeo with important plans. Track #7, "Okey Dokey Boogie," uses Ella Mae Morse's "Okie Boogie" (already a sprightly hay-bale rumpus) as a launch spot, from which swing-bop jumps everywhere at once. Agitating between are vintage-crafted numbers that illustrate players' gifts and ring as if they hang hats in a roadside joint. Belly-rub goodbye track "Blue Light" guarantees her head will find your shoulder.

Recommended: "On Your Balcony," "Marylou," "Louisiana Rhythm," "Sweet Cherry Pie," "Okey Dokey Boogie," "Blue Light"

No First Landing Videos available at press time . Here's "Flip, Flop, and Fly" (live)

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La Ley De La Calle   EP

(Bam Bam Records)

Mexican insurgents recently notorious for "In Punk We Thrash" return, shredded and deafening omni-pugnacity illustrating utter lack of domestication. If ever chords were slung at fiercer velocities, no witness survived to scrawl account.

Recommended: "La Ley De La Calle," "Miseria," "El Asalto," "Envidiosos," "Dias De Vicio"

Videos: "La Ley De La Calle"   "El Asalto"   "Dias De Vicio"

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The Vampires of Kopenhagen

Last Train to Copenhagen   EP

(Sleaszy Rider Records)

Supreme ghastliness breathes (or not) within ebony cover, majesty apparent. Dignified passages present sinister splendor, chamber music a blood-tide that buoys otherwise unspeakable imaginings. 

Recommended: "Last Train to Copenhagen," "Lullaby"

Video: "Last Train to Copenhagen" (abbreviated)

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Back In the Day, 2006

The Bluejays

A Hundred Songs

(Hithouse)

It's the desired destination of countless musicians, the point at which alluring strains, siken harmonies and trusted roots stylings collude with thoughtful verse. Real world music grounded in human experience, but reaching still for the fantastic. For the Bluejays, that rainbow's end reward is but the starting line.

Recommended: "A Hundred Songs," "Guess Why I'm Crying," "If You'd Get Out of My Way," "I Do What You Want Me To," "Devil in Disguise," "Anytime," "Too Bad," "What Kind of Girl"

Videos: "A Hundred Songs"   "Devil in Disguise"   "Too Bad"   "What Kind of Girl"

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2014 release

Morcegula

Punk vets - Uberlândian skin-thrasher Rebeca Li and Henrique Badke (Flying V-slinger from Rio) - throw themselves into darker-than-dark, louder-than-loud "Rock'n'Roll Trevoso" that towering Mr. Fire-Breath just can't get too much of.

Video: "Godzilla"

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13 Bats

Perhaps titled as a nod to 13 Cats, Madrid harshmasters pour all nth degree adrenaline asurge within them into 1:47 of when-whip-comes-down onrush.

Video: "Se Altera en Consulta"

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Rick Larson: Greatness at the margin

A guitar is buried in Marshalltown, Iowa. This is why:

A flash point is possible in live music. An organic, vital moment in which emotional and sensory phenomena coalesce in a connected soloist's muse articulation. The spark surges through the crowd, electrifying the atmosphere and leaving listeners viscerally touched.

Skin crawls. Grins erupt. Shouts ring out. And all is right with the world -- at least for that moment.

Marshalltown, Iowa's Rick Larson found his way into that magical moment of greatness -- more than once, if truth be told -- as had so many unsung beat champions before him.

My brother, he knew his life's purpose from an early age. He got his first guitar when 12 and devoted himself to single-minded pursuit of earthly calling.

Stevie Ray Vaughn, Keith Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Guy, Joe Strummer, Pete Townsend - these were his influences. He played the music that spoke to him, and it became important to his audiences.

No prisoner of stylistic convention, he was as likely to rock the house as finesse a melody. He made all the right stops, from red-hot jumpin' to cool-blue orating. His intoxicating soloing interpreted heartache, passion, and kick-out-the-jams exuberance. Lesser players were made conscious of their limitations.

The demands of post-teen life typically compel young players to eventually pursue day jobs, relegating live music to weekend hobby status, if even that. 

But Rick never stopped. Because he and music were of a piece. And to him, no other pursuits mattered.

He never cut an album, shot a video or graced a magazine cover. What he did was infinitely more important. A veteran of America's bar-band culture, he helped keep Blues and Rock'n'Roll alive before average people every night.

For them, plagued by trials throughout the work week, the release and revelry offered by live bands is salvational. A person can be put down by a boss during the day, but be ten feet tall on the midnight dance floor.

Songs to which grassroots blue-collar crowds today shout and thrill have roots in America's many-fathered culture and wonderfully diverse heritage. Tempos, melodic inclinations, and engaging rhythms from a score of shores met here and became new and as one.

American songs derive from the Appalachian Mountain country and humming streets of Chicago. They hail from highways that crisscross the nation and from the farmlands. From the cities, swamps, and suburbs. And they are born from common experiences, telling of human struggles, aspirations, pains, and triumphs.

It is through the efforts of anonymous players that folk stories and voices survive from generation to generation. A country's music serves as both popular record and expression of national character.

Rick was professionally active in central Iowa from the seventies through the mid-nineties. Indeed, the area live-music circuit was richer for his indefatigable participation.

He co-founded numerous central Iowa groups: Amo, Armed and Dangerous, Party House, Ice Age, the Vipers, Commotion. And too many more to mention. Singer/harp player Mark Goodman and drummer Frank McDowell were usually in the mix. Accompanying players included keyboardist Doc Lawson and guitarist/vocalist Dave Taylor.

Sometimes, formal band names or line-ups were not even needed. If a sudden gig opened up or a last-minute party jam presented itself, Rick would be there. Guitar in hand, amplifier on.

He had something crucial to worthwhile musicianship: an absolute and unfeigned direct line between his heart and his art. He believed in each note he touched.

True, a few of the better chart songs sometimes crept into the late- night sets. But only the better ones. For Rick, ignoring his instincts and selling out his musical integrity were simply not options. The gold ring mattered less than the music. The moment.

Devoted rank-and-file bar musicians like Rick who keep music alive -- who realize that all-important moment -- are infinitely more significant to real world listeners than is the trendy WRIT LARGE corporate music-product industry that takes listeners for granted.

For every transient and fabricated chart sensation, there are innumerable unsung authentics. And greatness belongs to them, too. Probably most of all.

For it is indeed possible to reach greatness in isolation from the "big picture," without the whole world's being aware.

Rick did.

His guitar fell silent in 1998. We laid to earth with him the cherry wood-grain, Gibson SG Standard that had been his earliest performing guitar. It was only right that they remain together into perpetuity. Together, they had realized the moment.

That is how I know that greatness can flourish at the margin.

And that is why a guitar is buried in Marshalltown, Iowa.

Rick and longtime associate singer Mark Goodman.

Long Lasting Train

Full Speed to Nowhere (2014 - 2016)

(Fucking North Pole Records)

Desperately search though they will, the fearful will locate no refuge. Instead, and from all around, sheer racket of the finest kind ravishes eardrums with unstoppable velocity, as blasts from amplifiers connected to city-leveling machinery of unknown scientific genesis communicate the surliness and bellicosity that churn in every outsider-by-choice's crimson.

Recommended: "Total Blackout," "SPIT," "Recovery Rox," "Ratz," "Echoes of Death," "Obey the Grey," "Vaporized Brain," "Death Proof," "Black Book," "Whiskey Business," "Out of Jail...Goodnight World"

Videos: "Total Blackout"   "Black Book"   "Whiskey Business"   "Out of Jail...Goodnight World"

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The Phantom A.D.

Revenge of...the Phantom A.D.

(Rock N Rhythm Records)

He never drinks...wine. Here in the Phantom A.D.'s cobwebbed, latex-monster hood, darkness is a 24/7 proposition. Splenetic chords race like risen-from-beneath, demolition terrors, hip to the ways of lost avenues Rock'n'Roll. Swirling his cape while surfing atop a saucer, The Phantom A.D. growls enunciations that bespeak horrors good men know not. Martin Milner scrambles for exit, though Mickey "Bip Bop Boom" Hawks and Shadowman Link stick around where the action is.

Change for the strange, it comes: In months before us, the Phantom A.D. will unfurl finger-popping bizzaritude across Norman Rockwell's placid middle states.

(Backstage, respect is due Isaac Rother. The man behind this all is a prolific composer, shaper of six-string stimulations, and master contriver of monstery kicks.)

Recommended: "Revenge of the Phantom," "Spider Baby," "Chainsaw Rock," "Alley of Terror," "13 Ghosts (in Illusion-O)," "Phantom's Rumble," "Mark of the Vampire," "Gator's Grin"

Videos: "Spider Baby"   "Chainsaw Rock"   "13 Ghosts (in Illusion-O)"   "Phantom's Rumble"   "Gator's Grin"

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Sugar Britches

Cover That Shit Up

(Pantalones del Azucar)

For their fourth album, the dusty-booted Americana dab hands chose an all-covers program. A host of worthies from Roger Alan Wade to Bob McDill, and all the way to Brian Johanson, receive fence post badlands reinvention. (Even Madonna, Queen, and Sir Elton John feel the lasso.) Not so much as one shred less impressive than songsmiths referenced: members' mastery of playing-implements they have grips on. There's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight.

Recommended: "Fryin' Bacon Nekkid," "Egg and Daughter Nite, Lincoln, NE 1967 (Crazy Bone," "It Must Be Love," "Last Nite," "Look on Your Face," "Rocket Man," "Fat bottomed Girls," "The Biggest Lie"

Videos: "It Must Be Love"   "Look On Your Face"   "The Biggest Lie"

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The Cain Pit

Sorrow & Joy

(Jungle Records)

Here revolves prime opportunity for rectification; specifically, for not having purchased the BluegrassPunkPsychoCowpunk group's earlier Sorrow and Joy EPs. Both are here. It's in these robust barnburners of beery good humor that old-ways home folk horse-and-buggy in from back country, and rip-stitched hellions abandon city avenues, to throw rumbustious bachanalia the equal of any shivaree you might cite. It'd make for great memories - if anyone could remember it the following morning.

While Sorrow and Joy was self-issued in last year's concluding weeks, Jungle now offers the combined release in red-vinyl form.

Recommended: "Alder," "IJTYSK," "White Lines," "Platform," "Devil's Side," "My Bloody Valentine," "Dead Man's Guitar"

Videos: "Alder"   "Devil's Side"   "My Bloody Valentine"   "Dead Man's Guitar"

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Fear of Last Orders

Leadbelly's recording of "Midnight Special" is famed. The storied Bluesman may well have learned the old prisoner song whilst serving time in Sugar Land, Texas stony lonesome Imperial Farm Prison. As surely as he couldn't have imagined (possibly soon-to-be-besotted) English rousters standing and delivering a lusty throated revisitation, Leadbelly can be envisioned raising his glass in salutation.

Video: "Midnight Special"

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13 Bats & Resurex

An ode, of vigorous sort, to a flesh-tearing miscreation who would surely join us in relishing this mercilessly strapped, poetic darkness.

Video: "Monster Man"   

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Barry Ryan: Six-string statesman                

Minneapolis, 1980 -- A strippers-by-day, Rock'n'Roll-by-night club called Duffy's was showcasing Anglo-American group the Rockats during its Octemberfest. Only a year or so had passed since they'd split with Levi Dexter and realigned, having added several new members. 

Weeks before, they'd issued "Rockabilly Doll" b/w"Tanya Jean" (Kat Tale), giving early voice to the burgeoning US rockabilly movement. (I still own the 45 I purchased back then. Sadly, the accompanying brown/white/black mini-poster was lost to the ages.)

I was in that night's jam-packed audience. I was forever changed. The Rockats were everything a rank-and-file rebel could have hoped for. A formidable and precise, swinging Rock'n'Roll spectacle, they sported tailored cat style and showy, acrobatic professionalism. Under multi-colored strobes, the whole damn stage erupted.

And Barry Ryan was a major factor in their distinction. Having arrived from NYC Punk upstarts The Victims, he stalked the stage, reborn as the six-string statesman of a pomped subculture.

His onslaughts benefited beyond gauging from judicious dispatch. His styling drew on American popular music's Blues and Country roots, and crafted a glorious pastiche. 

(Scratch that past tense usage -- he remains among Rockabilly's premier pickers.)

Several years back, Barry reflected on the era that spawned the Rockats' first LP, a live explosion of creepered exuberance.

"Island Records head Chris Blackwell signed the Rockats on the advice of Grace Jones in late 1980. We went to London in December to start recording. For one reason or another, the sessions weren't matching up to our live shows. So the project was dumped and we came back to NY. 

"It was decided that the best thing to do was to do a live record. We recorded two consecutive nights at the Ritz, but I believe only the first night was used. Both nights were sold out and that's Billy Idol who introduces the band and also sang on the encore of Chuck Berry's "Around and Around," which wasn't included on the release."

Mr. Ryan performs a vital function, linking today and yesterday. The uproarious souls of gritty Blues and traditional Country step and whirl in gladsome union, spurred into fancy-footed Rock'n'Roll transmogrification. 

His hard-lived experience -- global touring, midnight stages, simultaneous uncertainty/exhilaration of Rock'n'Roll life -- resounds in each of his twanged, thrashed or elegantly touched-off notes.

Over decades, the Rockats counted various other remarkable guitarists as transient members. But to my mind, Barry always was the band's defining guitar voice. Others contributed especial piquance, but he was that group's constant. A Rockats without Barry's inimitable fretboard touches was inconceivable. 

The final release by the legendary group came in the form of 2021's Start Over Again.

Newly minted originals "Rock, Baby, Rock (All Night Long)," "Rockabilly Swamp," "Lucky Old Rockabilly (Walking Down the Pike),"and "Working Man" were apt complements to covers of Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, and others. 

1980 single "Rockabilly Doll" b/w "Tanya Jean" was remastered and reminded of the combo's initial promise. 

In short, the music was such a capstone as to render many competitors' toils superfluous. Enough good cannot be stated of the Rockats' cohesive deploy of rockin' mannerisms. They'd never sounded more committed to good times.

Barry had earned further global renown. He carved out a legend with New York zydeco ensemble Lucky 7, waxed volatile solo endeavors, was often tapped for live appearances by legend Robert Gordon, and recorded and gigged with Gary Setzer as Rockabilly X.

Such men, through impassioned devotion to Rock'n'Roll and the magical effect it can have to better average people's lives, accomplish something far larger and more significant than any isolated work. They give us all a finer world.

All of which seemed possible, if only hinted at, that bygone Minneapolis night.

Online examples of Barry's prowess seem ubiquitous: "Rite Time" (1981 w/Tim Scott McConnell)  "Make That Move" (1983 w/Danny B Harvey)  "Downtown Saturday Night" (1994)   "Rockabilly Barry Ryan!" (solo)  "Black Slacks / Red Hot" (live w/Robert Gordon)   "Joshua's Plea"  (2012 w/Rockabilly X - Barry on vocals + guitar)

2025

The Brains

No Brain, No Pain

(Cleopatra)

With their 2005 maiden platter, leathery Rene, Colin the Dead, and Phil the Beast tipped quiffs as among Psychobilly's fastest and loudest wrecking locomotives. Simultaneously entering were unsettling Creature-featurism vibes and screamed asylum declarations. The volatile admixture can and does explode. Realities splinter into technicolor mayhem. Cleopatra reissued No Brain, No Pain in 2023 for the benefit of all hungering to hear a blast furnace ripped from cellar flooring and heaved with perilous ambition.

Recommended: "No Brain, No Pain," "Black Jack Death Bet," "Taste Your Blood," "Train (Keeps A-Rollin' On)," "Don't Wanna," "Crazy Paradise," "Murcielagos" (bonus cut)

Videos: "No Brain, No Pain" (official video)   "Taste Your Blood"   "Crazy Paradise"   "Murcielagos"

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Trouble Bound

Step to the Line

(Mild Chaos)

When last we tore toward New York grenade-hurlers Trouble Bound, the melody fetishistic aggression-cell had just released its 2025, 20th anniversary vinyl iteration of Here to the End. Today, as much as then, songs are both substantial and fleet; crisp attestation that craggy substance (with stand-tall wordage) need not hinder capsule trajectory.

Recommended: "Set the Record Straight," "Cup Full of Cyanide," "The Only Way I Know," "Maximum Security," "Red Light," "Step to the Line," "Paranoia"

Videos: "Set the Record Straight"   "The Only Way I Know" (official video)   "Step to the Line"

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The Aftermiters

La Venganza de los Desheredados   EP

(Ruido! Records)

Vituperation en Espanol. "Sepulterera" opens by snatching the Munsters' theme (composed by Jazz guitarist/arranger/Capitol Records producer Jack Marshall), before segueing into ten-league-booted bonfire of bellicosity. Such typifies assembled songs in the main: Fiercely dispatched Punk that pulls off rough trade business with neither reserve nor solicitude for postured propriety.

Recommended: "Sicario," "Instinto Felino," "Sepulturera," "Cuervos," "La Venganza de los Desheredados"

Videos: "Sepulterera" (official video)   "Venganza de los Desheredados"

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MindFucks

Tales of Love and Murder

(MindFuck Music)

Fluency in Dutch isn't required to interpret as malevolent the snarled, spat lyrics washed onto grim shores by waves of poison. Falling in rank with the Rotterdam bashers' own splendid bombardments is Nina Simone subjected to Strickfadenization. 

Recommended: "The Butcher," "The Deep Ones," "Death Row," "Voodoo Curse," "Zombie Killer," "The Last Sun," "Fat Roll Boogie," "Misunderstood"

Videos: "The Deep Ones" (official video)   "The Last Sun"   "Misunderstood"

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The $100 Quartet

A spring-heeled composite of BR5-49 and the Bellfuries, this foursome turns Moon Mullican's 1951 King single inside, outside, and upside down. (As BR5-49 had in previous days.) The assorted Rockabilly Rave 2026 movers/shakers chant happy zeal, as loose-limbed Country bounds through airspace - and how.

Video: "Cherokee Boogie"

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Nic Roulette & the Ricochets

Cindy Walker penned this for Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, who recorded it for Columbia in 1941. Now, Nashville's Ricochets put down as genteel and slyly spry a take as has caressed ears since Mr. Wills and his booted minstrels two-foured into the descending sun. And Hillbilly Casino dervish, Nic, proves to be exactly the voice needed to crest Jackpot Ridge.

Video: "It's All Your Fault"

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Dale Watson: Music as the reckoning of a man

Does Dale Watson realize how important he and his music are?

The man upholds and advances traditional Country Music -- the hand-tooled kind that reflects the aspirations, heartaches, and end-of-work-week, shout-and-stomp barroom release that a million corporate Nashville types twiddling computerized studio knobs for a million years couldn't replicate.

From his easy smile and laconic drawl to his silver, mile-high pomp and classy, Grand Ole Opry-redolent, populist troubadour clothes, Dale couldn't be anything but the authentic Country music last call luminary his loyal fan base lauds. And, issued earlier in the year by 40 Below Records, fresh platter Unwanted offers the many splendored barroom serenading for which Dale has long been known.

Steel-guitared romps bounce affably, with winks and cosmopolitan assurance. ("Gotta Try Harder," "Never Mend the Broken Spoke.") Sporadic punctuation arrives, in the person of movingly introspective material whose subdued manner is of wholly Country bearing. ("If You Truly Love Me," "If I Can.")

Located here and again are even strapping numbers that might could drive a fella to try his hand at that mustang nobody could break. ("What the Hell Happened To the Cadillac," "Don't Let the Honky Tonks Go," and the five-star title cut.)

Dale's Telecaster rhythms pulse and shimmer, his inventive leads sing out, and his ingratiating vocal warmth encourages all to pull up bar stools. Whether the clever material is dynamically uptempo, infectious and witty, articulating profound emotions, or charging gleefully into melodic mischief, adjoining players negotiate every backroad and neon-lighted avenue in sterling manner, as their leader maintains good-hearted command.

His objective importance lies in his priceless role as devoted counter to insipid Pop-Country. (A sterile contraption that can neither speak for plain home-folks, nor goad them to don whirlyspurs.) That needed function, and simply because the music itself is so damned good, is why Dale Watson is of significance to every listener who knows Real Country when he is lucky enough to hear it. 

In fact, Dale Watson and Wayne 'The Train' Hancock are of the same rank: crucial, contemporary interpreters of bona fide classic Country styles who have every right to be hailed and featured by industry award-bestowers and powers-that-be, but who are too real and uncompromising to ever turn painstakingly manicured 'show me the money' heads.      

As long as music this wood-grained and leather-worked is accessible, does it really matter that industry-calculated honors generally salute dreckish artificiality? After all, such foolish, televised corporate pageantry doesn't impede appreciators of the real deal from enjoying it. 

Historians recall Thomas Jefferson remarking, when asked how he could abide the free exercise of religions other than his own: "They neither break my arm, nor pick my pocket." With similar indifference, we will let the clothes-horses prance. 

Dale Watson must realize how important he and his music are. If he doesn't, he's the only one.

"South of Roundrock Texas" (Austin1996?)   "I Lie When I Drink" (Austin City Limits 2014)   "Don't Let the Honky Tonks Go"   "What the Hell Happened to the Cadillac" (both from new Unwanted)   

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