DC Larson's JUKEBOX JURY

Eddy and the Backfires

Bite Baby Bite EP

(Backfire Records)

Woe be to grinches 'cross the burg that crave shut eye - Eddy and the Backfires are in town, and they're raising all kinds of house-shakin' ruckus. They've taken the wildcat roar that dates from fins 'n' whitewalls late nights, and pumped it to overflow with kickapoo joy juice. Pillows over heads provide no escape.

Recommended: "Bite Baby Bite," "On the Run," "Chasing Leader"

Videos: "Bite Baby Bite" "Chasing Leader"

Chemical Valley Mutants

Struggle

(Self-issued)

Acerbic castigations of existent authority, coupled with jaw-jutted demands for liberty, are spat in scraped-concrete tones, and arrive within zoom-smash missiles. Praise I penned in review of the band's 2023 Poisoned ("Songs collected on their newest disc rage against worldly injustices via fierce assault on polite-society notions of musicality") hold no less true today. Led by filmmaker Jay Crimson, all involved seem intent on thunderous obliteration; damned if they don't prove equal to the ambition.

July 3 release is scheduled.

Recommended: "Struggle," "Pessimist," "No Supremacy," "Ignorant," "Slander," "When Her Eyes Roll Back"

No current Video available. This is a live performance of "Left Hand Path," from Poisoned.

Black Kat Boppers

All Out Rock'n'Roll digital album

(Swelltune Records)

One pointy alligator shoe stomping in Sun world, the other imprinting Blues swampscape, and mojos cavorting in Mashed Potato abandon all the while. Lauded scene habitués Roy, Luca, Dylan, and Colin affirm again why they're major attractions hither and thither. Don't comb tracks for ponderous cogitation, just grab some pick-'em-up-and-put-'em-downs.

(Collaboration and graphic artwork come courtesy of Clash-mate and dedicated supporter Paul Simonon who, on occassion, also subs on four-string axe at gigs.)

Recommended: "Billy Billy," "All Out Rock'n'Roll," "Scream & Holla," "Black Kat Boppin' atcha," "Casting My Spell," "Rollin' In," "You Silly Thing"

Videos: "Billy Billy" (live at Rockabilly Rave 2026) "All Out Rock'n'Roll" (live at Continental Club 2024) "Casting My Spell" (live at Hank Dietle's Tavern 2024) "You Silly Thing" (recorded in separate locations during COVID era)

Screamin' Rebel Angels

What did Congreve write about a woman scorned? Joyce Green's incendiary 1959 Vaden Records stomper is revisited with all the self-righteousness and slitted-eyes finality of its initial iteration. Boz and Lyn Boorer pack proceedings with sufficient TNT to send flesh-and-blood bits of said carouser into past tense. Laura don't take no mess.

Video: "Black Cadillac"

The Gasölines

Though hurtling and bash-fisted, these severe minutes are also possessed of appeal familiar to brave ravers who dimly recall club episodes, midsommer midnight, or arena frenzies. People were killed by Morten Nilsen's guitar solo - and they're still grinning.

Video: "(I'm Not) Your Mirror"

Big Cartel

AI music poisonous counterfeit

Music is an expression of humanity, not technological artifice. Composition begins in thought. Instrumental realization is most honestly performed by human beings.

There were no wind-up keys in the plaid-shirted backs of Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West.

Machines are not capable of independent thought, creativity, or interpretive production. True, artificial intelligence programs can in a twinkling assemble ideas fed into them by humans -- and they certainly can arrange those per typed request -- but no cold contraption ever had a brainstorm.

While penning these words, I asked an artificial intelligence program to compose Rockabilly song lyrics. Here's one verse:

Well, it's a cyber-billy boogie on the radio waves
Yeah, a cyber-billy boogie driving everyone crazy
Flip my toggle switch, baby, watch me go
Got a million gigabytes of Rock and Roll!

That's a far piece from Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Whether a song's author breaks fresh stylistic turf or embroiders upon already existent fashions, he cannot help but be (at least somewhat) reflective of cultural persuasions.

Not only is artificial intelligence unaware of social permutations not generally accessible in the clouds -- it can't even flip its own ON switch.

Despite all that, manufactured music in sundry genres is seemingly ubiquitous. Persons exploring musics online must tread with caution as if in sketchy neighborhoods.

Understood is that a songwriter or producer might find it simpler to pour notions into machines, rather than enlist breathing players, that their visions assume form.

But the result reeks of sterility. It satisfies no discerning listener who truly loves music.

A factory construct can't feel exhileration, heartbreak, or rebelliousness. Those emotional phenomena -- which prompt creation and inject real, blood-surging life into music -- are exclusive to people. State-of-the-art components can no more cry or laugh than can store-window manniquins.

The battle between man and machine is hardly a new matter. John Henry, the steel-drivin' man of railroad-worker choruses' folk legend, was said to have pounded more spikes than his metallic, steam-powered competitor.

Just so, human conceptions embody actual life sparks that doggerel issued from components simply does not. Man stands victorious.

I'll hand over a million dollars to anyone who can produce a mechanism that's known the blues.

Sunday, June 21, 2026

Forsaken Profits

Road Rash

(Anything But Radio Records)

Traffic poles look like a picket fence -- red/yellow/green being of no consequence -- as thrashing demons fly toward destinations unmolested. Some 14 years since they first materialized as a "drinking band with a Punk problem," and their collective fury remains as vigorous as when germination sprouted. This, then, is violent rapidity very much of our fraught moment.

Recommended: "DTE," "Chemical Burn," "Decayed," "Absolute Zero," "Avalanche"

Videos: "DTE" "Chemical Burn" (live at Skatetopia) "Decayed"

Marley Bone

Red Gators

(Marleybone Records)

When this writer terms Marley Bone predictable, that's not intended to be taken as a negative. The truth is a far piece down the road. The combo is a money-in-the-bank proposition: Reliably swinging bopmen that don't want no scufflin', just all-night fun.

"Neesey" and "Vampire" were previously available as singles. Both were appaised here: "Would that all combos were similarly adept at contriving hushed romanticism. Group vocal eminence floats. Blissful stirrings are brought to a head by womanly radiance," I wrote of "Neesey."

And of Vampire Orgy: "No one returns to the land of the living from this revelry. Intonations adorning low-gear, chunka-chunka Rockabilly nonchalance articulate a doomful scenario."

Newer material jumps, glides, and stutter-steps with the assurance of a hepster who's been around the block a couple of times, knows what's worth attention, and can deal it out for the pleasure of all at hand.

It's in the bank.

Recommended: "Red Gators," "First in Line," "Neesey Smile," "Vampire Orgy," "Lipstick," "Same Old Swing"

Videos: "Red Gators" (live) "Neesey Smile" "Vampire Orgy" "Same Old Swing"

Cash O'Riley

Booze, Lust, Lies & Heartache...Revisited digital

(Rumble Road Records)

Initially issued in 2002, Cash's Booze again populates earways, now in fresh incarnation. Good ol' hayseed romping mashed into chipper with outlawism and razor-ready Blues; what exits demands discernment. Select passages recall glorious half-moment before hillbilly heels were kicked up toward what local hands would term Rockabilly. Every love-lucky, back-country buck carries a homestyle dolly's curling b&w snap in his britches' bib pocket.

(All proceeds from digital sales go directly to worthy cause "Hobohemian" Cash.)

Recommended: "Send Along," "Big City Queen," "Everytime You Walk," "The Last Time," "I'll Be Gone," "I May Have," "Make You Cry," "Enough Beer"

Videos: "Big City Queen" "Everytime You Walk" "The Last Time" "Enough Beer"

Pig Boys

Feralization

(Self-issued)

Woefully scant online information was all the present writer could locate. Virtually zero 'net presence, which is thoroughly Punk. (And long live hand-scrawled gig flyers!) No more needs observing, save for how kick-ass it is to encounter chord-brutalizers in larval stage.

Recommended: "Rockhound," "Get in My Car," "Pop Country Casualty," "The System Killed My Baby," "Feralization"

Videos: "Rockhound" "Get in My Car" "The System Killed My Baby"

Youtube page

The P-Town Skanks

"Meat" finds sharp-incisored Psycho and histrionic throat-urgings punctuated by a curious break -- that may have been recorded on the sly at some Eastern-territory hands-in-air celebration (bongos -- and is that a zurna?) -- before again tearing ass.

Video: "Meat"

Red-Hot Dynamos

They may cruise Italian strade, but the RHDs purvey old-ways Nashville tunery with all the realness of Robert's regulars. And their digital shufflers are fine as frog hair. But as the numbers here presented illustrate, it's high time a physical, full-length record could be grabbed from shelves. And I mean everywhere.

Videos: "Moonshiner's Run" "Excuse Me"

Youtube channel

Rock'n'Roll solution, not problem

"Rock'n'Roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons...and, by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd -- in fact, plain dirty -- lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has ever been my misfortune to hear."

- Frank Sinatra 1957

Ol' Blue Eyes mentioned no names in his caustic grading. But his condemnation included not just onstage interpreters and those cheering on the raucous evolution, but also, by implication, the profound reshaping it delivered to the entire planet.

Sinatra, of course, epitomized an earlier idealization of the coolness spirit. But his favored model was a dinner-jacketed, cocktail-slinging hipster whose winked argot and nightclub long-legging had become passé, given generational exchange.

(And it merits remark that, when younger, Frankie had himself been assailed by clucking parents. It is not known to what degree his transformation from objection's focus to its spokesman was genuine or simply prompted by professional apprehension.)

The coolness of his era was one to be observed, to be entertained by, and perhaps aspired toward. But the new Rebel Music was egalitarian. Of its audience. Everyone could be a Rock'n'Roller, whereas only the socially well-situated orbited the Rat Pack galaxy.

Much 1950s Rebel Music was Southern and not Northern in origin. It was produced by the working poor, not imposed downwardly upon them by a gold cuff-linked, Copacabana elite. Factors of class and region had not been so prominent in popular culture. Rock'n'Roll ushered to the table's head constituencies theretofore

unacknowledged.

Too, Rock'n'Roll was of multi-racial character. It was and remains an ill fit for propagandizing separatists. To twist an aged saw, a bird needs both the black Blues wing and the white Country one to flip, flop, and fly. Remove either from the equation and you can have fine music, true. But it won't be Rock'n'Roll.

Hailed since as masters and giants, pioneers more likely stumbled onto greatness as blueprinted its construction. And their ambitions doubtless prioritized daily bread above dreams of renown.

But from a patchwork foundation of poor boy nerve and determination rose a phenomenon so unique in its make-up, so cracklingly vibrant amid placid pop culture, that it endures, still.

As a singer, Frank Sinatra was a baker's dozen sorts of koo-koo. But that he didn't dig Rock'n'Roll back then was his problem, not ours.

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg

"Blowin' in the Wind" "Time Won't Let Me" singles

(Dog Snout Inc.)

Draping Dylan's soggy plaint in leather was a lost cause (G. Bailey was wrong - not all lost causes are worth fighting for). The Outsiders' 1966 "Time Won't Let Me" was a much superior choice for kamikaze reinvention (organ intact). Kingpin Marky and band drive fists through graffitied wall.

Video: "Time Won't Let Me"

Site

The Darts (US)

Halloween Love Songs

(Adrenalin Fix Music)

Singer/keyboardist Nicole Laurenne: "During a 2024 interview with Rock n Folk magazine in Paris, I jokingly mentioned that the world needed some new Halloween songs...So I got to work..."

The result? When the mystery hearse smashed into the joint, assorted kicks-junkies dropped glasses to the floor. And when the ebony corpsemobile plowed into the blinking juke, and sounds at once ghastly and seductive roared forth, all surrendered to magnetism of unknown birth...

Back to Nicole (who also wields a glockenspiel): "So, side A is chock full of tasty, candy-colored Halloween kitsch, to be played while trick-or-treating as the sun sets...But side B is for after dark, when the bonfire is raging. It's for sweaty, middle-of-the-night dancing, making out on a bed of empty candy wrappers, and spinning through an all-nighter apocalypse."

Recommended: "Midnight Creep," "Zombies on the Metro," "Blood Run Cold," "Dream Ghost," "Every Night is Halloween," "Apocalypse," "Darkness," "Shadow," "Late Drive"

Videos: "Midnight Creep" (official video) "Zombies on the Metro" (Now Dig This TV performance) "Every Night is Halloween" (lyric video) "Apocalypse"

Los Psychotrópicos

Expulsado de los Cielos EP

(Self-issued)

The taboo pleasures of Medellin's wee-hours Rock'n'Roll scene are never trumpeted in promotional travel pamphlets, but are surely treasured by revelers. And the three men who compose Los Psychotropics give them what they crave: Psychobilly with zero accoutrements. The songs they unleash are rapid, robust, and hurtle in skeletal splendor. Cooking with nitro. And on behalf of males the globe over, I'd like to extend gratitude to the combo for employing a naughty nurse for onstage exhibition.

Recommended: "Expulsado de los Cielos," "Largas Piernas," "Aquí Te Espero," "Destrucción"

Videos: "Expulsado de los Cielos" "Aquí Te Espero" "Largas Piernas" (lyric video) "Destruccion"

Kafadan Kontak Records

Back in the Day, 2017

Hillbilly Hellcats

s/t digital

(Audiosparx / Rosenklang)

32 slices from past platters. Some smooth, others serrated. Most were culled from Rev It Up with Taz (1996) and Our Brand (1998). In addition to cut-above wittiness that is at turns self-deprecating - and the ten-miles-high musical chops of Chuck Hughes, Lance Bakemeyer, and Taz Bentley - this compilation offers salvation to those previously denied admittance to creepered Mystic Order of the Ostinato swing society meetings for not having purchased songs when first dealt to vendors.

Recommended: "Road Rage," "White Trash," "Leavin' Colorado," "Hippie Dance," "Tom Grey's Dream," "Everybody There Was Drinkin' Martinis but Me," "Crazy Little Baby," "Hillbillies on Speed," "Havin' it All," "Hillbilly Love," "I Wanna Be a Rockabilly Rebel," "Cats Like Us," "My Baby Moved," "Better Be Some Drinkin'," "Over and Over," "Train to Nowhere," "I Dig Jazz," "A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action," "I Never Thought"

Videos: "Everybody There Was Drinkin' Martinis but Me" "Crazy Little Baby" "I Wanna Be a Rockabilly Rebel" "Better Be Some Drinkin'" "I Dig Jazz" "I Never Thought"

Jake Vaadeland

Whatever the Canadian equivalent of Americana might be, otherwise-Rockabilly Jake breathes it deeply. His tale of great-grandparents' journey from Norway to establish family province in Saskatchewan is one only he and thoughtful acoustic could relate.

Video: "The Homesteader's Song"