This is a collection of singles from WALL’s debut EP out on 15th january 2015
With each sonic movement on the introductory self-titled EP from New Yorkʼs WALL there’s a commitment to defend a punctuated duality between curiosity and triumph. After all, whatʼs a band worth but its message? A certain self-awareness of the very question is at the heart of the WALL apparatus and listening along as they discover themselves throughout this EP is invigorating and scary. Tone and rhythm whirl together, like an emergency exit door choreographed to swing flawlessly in time to its damned and chaotic Pavlovian alarm bell. From the first rigid and cautious seconds of their EP, WALL unleashes an uncanny self-awareness that methodically slips pages ripped from demented No Wave legacies through a shredder of their own design. Their spirit is exceptional and candid; generous heaps of raw energy and inspired moments of tension demand repeat rotations on your turntable. With this debutante artifact, WALL have invited the world to witness the birth of a toxic-new tempestuous bloodwave of post-punk, exactly the transfusion the scene needs to stay alive. Edition of 300 Records.
First drummer Vanessa Gomez took to the stage, small and steely-eyed, pointing her drumsticks skywards, like one of those Ancient Egyptian dog-man creatures stood guard over the Temple Of No Wave. Then Elizabeth Skadden joined her, in sensible knitwear, her bass slung preposterously low like Paul Simonon’s. The soon pair locked into a groove that could not have been more urgent had it been sent by cycle courier with red tape up the edges.
Guitarist Vince McClelland – a tall pretty boy with a Jerry Lee corkscrew of mousy blonde hair – was up next, striding out to scratch at the neck and the bridge of his guitar, whipping it like a disobedient donkey until it gave him the coarse atonalities he was looking for.
Finally, Sam York – long streak of piss, all 6ft limbs – jittered onstage, opened her long thin lungs, and unleashed her stream of consciousness that sounded like Dadaist pamphlets assembled from shredded brochures for Upper West Side therapists. WALL were the sound in my head. The sound of a fantasy New York of cracked pavements and broken lives, the rattle of subway cars, the whine of elderly people being assaulted, the fast staccato chop-shop rhythms of a tumbledown global capital. They were sharp and uncompromisingly so. Like early B-52s if they’d grown up on Wu Tang, this was swagger music, designed to make the weak feel stronger and the strong feel indomitable.
That sense of riding on the rim of a moment, circling on the edge of chaos, is the result of four very different minds coming together – a musical friendship that has taken on a chemistry above what its participants had anticipated.
In fact, when Elizabeth Skadden moved to New York after a three-year stint on the arts scene in Berlin, she wasn’t necessarily looking for a new band. “But being in a band is like falling in love. It always happens when you least expect…” WALL started when she hooked up with her childhood friend Sam York, who became the singer, drummer Vanessa Gomez who had only started playing a couple of months earlier, and guitarist VinceMcClelland, of 60s moptop homagers The Keepsies.
Ernest “Boom” Carter’s tenure in the E Street Band lasted a mere eight months. He joined on drums in February of 1974, after Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez got the boot; gigged around America with the group; participated in some early sessions for Born to Run; and left with keyboardist David Sancious that October to start the jazz fusion project Tone. Carter played on just one song that wound up on a Bruce Springsteen album: “Born toRun.” In the 2005 documentary Wings for Wheels, Springsteen could only laugh when talking about it. “Boom and Davy recorded ‘Born to Run’ and then left the band!” he said. “I said, ‘Wait! This is the one!'”
There are very few photos of Boom behind the kit at an E Street Band concert, and just a handful of decent recordings from his brief era. The ones that do exist are fascinating, since he’s a jazz-influenced drummer with a completely different style than Lopez or Max Weinberg. Here’s one such recording, taped at New York’s BottomLine on July 13th, 1974. The bandmates were in the middle of recording Born to Run, but the sessions had left them flat broke and forced to take gigs to pay the bills. Springsteen’s first two records had tanked, and Columbia was on the verge of dropping him. It’s easy to see why Carter and Sancious thought that leaving for a jazz fusion project made sense at the time, though in hindsight it wasn’t one of the smartest moves in rock history. Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan are quite grateful, though.
Here are four highlights from the show:
#0.04 – “Then She Kissed Me.” Phil Spector was a huge influence on Springsteen when he made Born to Run, so it’s no surprise that Springsteen opened the gig with this song that Spector produced and co-wrote for the Crystals in 1963. Like the Beach Boys did in 1965, Bruce switched around the genders. It’s the first known time he covered the song, though it became a regular on the Born to Run tour the next year. It returned to the set via fan request at shows in 2008 and 2009.
#33.55 –“Jungleland.” Not a single person in the club applauds when Springsteen says, “This is something called ‘Jungleland.’” That’s understandable, since the song wouldn’t appear on record for another 13 months. This is an early, messy, crazily long version of the tune – only the second known performance in public – and the lyrics are far from finished. “The streets alive with tough-kid Jets in Nova-light machines,” Springsteen sings. “Boys flash guitars like bayonets and rip holes in their jeans.” Most notably, there’s an extended guitar solo in place of the legendary sax solo. Clemons does play throughout the tune, but the sax solo heard on the album was the product of much studio work that came later. In this show, the band does a seemingly improvised jam at the end that spotlights Sancious and Carter’s jazz chops. Had they stuck around, Born to Run would have been a very different record.
#45.40 – “Born to Run.” “This is our new single, hot off the racks,” Springsteen says. “You can listen for it any day now. It’s called ‘Tramps Like Us, We Were Born to Run.'” He had debuted the tune two months earlier at a Harvard gig (while future manager Jon Landau sat in the audience), and it was already considerably closer to the finished version than “Jungleland,” but it wasn’t quite there yet. “Like animals racing in a black dark cage,” he sang. “Senses on overload/They’re gonna end this night in a senseless fight/And then watch the world explode.” Even in this early, slightly sloppy rendition, it was clear that Springsteen had a classic on his hands, and the crowd seemed to love it.
#1:17:10 – “New York City Serenade.” David Sancious’ greatest contribution to Springsteen’s catalog is the epic piano intro that starts off 1973’s “New York City Serenade.” It’s even longer here, kicking off a gorgeously tender, slow take on the song. The song occasionally pops up at shows these days, but Springsteen and bassist Garry Tallent are now the sole remaining E Street Band members who played on the album where it appeared, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. It’s great to hear this version of the song, with the vast majority of the original crew still onstage. Someday, Springsteen should really invite Sancious to guest with the E Street Band when they play this song. It would be a nice gesture to let Boom play drums on “Born to Run” one night, too, assuming that won’t be too painful a look at a life he nearly lived.
Independent Record Label based in Brooklyn New York City formed in 2007, included on its Roster are ZOLA JESUS, DAVID LYNCH, MOON DUO, THE MEN, PSYCHIC ILLS, and CRYSTAL STILTS one of the best american record label in the last 5 years,
It’s a prolific time for Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones label; with some of the finest records of the year released under their belts, plus last year they curated a stage at Liverpool Psych Fest (co-curated a stage with Chile’s BYM label), general manager Taylor Brode explains,
“I can’t imagine that I would ever be interested in doing something else as a career,” Taylor Brode tells us. It’s a familiar expression in the music industry, as common from the mouths of pouting indie rock hopefuls as from doe-eyed X Factor auditionees. Though intended to convey a mixture of romanticism, determination and focus, it almost always betrays the pie-in-the-sky hopelessness upon which dreams of fame and fortune are built – a lack of experience clouded, sometimes wilfully, by blind hope that the reality of ambition is neither intangible as clouds nor delicate as bubbles.
And yet when Brode utters those words, they sound perfectly straightforward; completely reasonable. Then again, her role as general manager of Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones Records is one where dreams and ideals have to be wedded to pragmatism – where romance has to be tempered by practicality without losing its sheen. “This is what I love to do,” she continues. “I love working with bands and finding out about new music, and just helping bands realise their goals.” That balance, it would appear, is in good health, which is presumably just one of the factors behind the renowned and increasingly respected indie label’s meteoric rise over the past eight years… but back up a minute. Let’s start earlier.
Sacred Bones was founded in 2007 by Caleb Braaten, an employee of Williamsburg’s Academy Records, who simply wanted to release an EP by his friends and reissue some curate’s eggs from the 80s heyday of British post-punk. Even as a youngster, he had always been surrounded by records. “His friends’ parents owned a store – they still do – called Twist and Shout, in Denver,” explains Brode cheerfully, with the knowledgeable air of someone well-versed in their own history. “He got into music from working there when he was younger, and he’s been a lifelong record collector. His taste is really wide, he likes a lot of post-punk and darker music, but also a lot of jazz and soul music and rap music… pretty broad.”
This open approach served Braaten well when he moved to New York over a decade ago, and began to immerse himself in Brooklyn’s notoriously hip music scene. “The first record that he ever put out was a seven-inch by this band called The Hunt, who were just good friends of his. He started a label to do that and also to do some reissues. It was mostly a New York-based label, and the bands were from here – people he’d met in the shop. Blank Dogs was the first 12-inch he ever put out, and that was [Captured Tracks boss] Mike Sniper’s band. They worked at Academy together, so that’s kind of how that came up.”
Food for thought is offered to anyone who imagines that starting a label – even in such a cultural metropolis – might be a glamorous pursuit. “He started the label in the basement of Academy, and he did two, three years there. I moved here in 2010 [having worked previously for Chicago’s legendary Touch and Go stable, the effortlessly professional Brode is no stranger to the industry] so we both worked in their basement for about two years. We moved into our office in 2012; we didn’t have internet and there were rats in the basement, no windows… it was truly a basement for a long time. But we have a proper office now with phones and stuff…!”
Since those humble beginnings, the label has relocated (along with Academy) to Green Point, slightly further to the north of Brooklyn than their Billyburg origins. It’s also become one of the most widely respected indie labels in North America – a tastemaker label in the mould of Sub Pop, Homestead or even Touch and Go, covering a wide base of genres from the glistening electronic pitter-patter of Blanck Mass to Jenny Hval’s deconstructivist, gender-freeing pop to Destruction Unit’s sandstorm-buffeted hardcore to… well, you get the picture. Did the label always have designs on such eclecticism, we wonder? Brode pauses to consider. “I think it was more just what was going on in Brooklyn; I don’t think [Braaten] started the label with the intention of it just being one genre. We’ve done folk records and a lot of psych records, and experimental, and noise… we try to keep it open.”
And yet it feels like there has been a consistent strand of darkness in the label’s output. “We don’t like to box ourselves in as being goth or dark or anything. People sort of attach that to us. I think a lot of it is because of ZolaJesus; we did all of her early records, and a lot of her coverage at the time was comparing her to Siouxsie, so I think we kind of got lumped in with that genre. It’s not really what we consider ourselves.
“You know The Men? Leave Home, the first record we did with them, sounds really different than the stuff they put out after; they got a lot more into country and folk and blues. They were sort of like a hardcore band at the beginning, but they really evolved over the four records we’ve done with them. We’ve had opportunities to work on stuff like that before but we’ve passed; we veer more towards the avant-garde, or edgy, weirder stuff.”
For all this wilful diversity, however, Sacred Bones have always been drawn towards the concept of visual uniformity: the vast majority of their sleeves bear a simple design concept created specifically to draw regular listeners to new projects. The significance of this straightforward notion is not lost on Brode. “It’s really important!” she exclaims. “Basically all of our full-length LPs carry a template, so they have the record label logo on the front, and then the album title, and all the tracks listed on the front of the record. Caleb designed that format with our graphic designer David Correll – he really wanted to have our records be instantly recognisable, so you could look at something and know it was a Sacred Bones record. It was inspired by the Factory Records stuff, and Impulse Jazz. We really tried to make it coherent, so our listeners could trust our taste and take a chance on a band they don’t know because they recognise it from being on the label.”
This format is a little more flexible for bands who’ve stayed with the label for more than two records, but it begs the question of whether anyone has been reluctant to go along with the theme. Brode laughs. “There’s been a couple of bands that don’t love it, but you know, it’s sort of part of our deal. So I think bands know when they sign with us. We’re pretty upfront about it and if bands don’t want to do it, we don’t do their records. But that’s really only happened one or two times at the most.”
In terms of the US labels we mentioned earlier, are Sacred Bones conscious of being part of that lineage? “I think we are now. We’re in our eighth year and things are pretty different from when we started. We’re getting to work with a lot of artists and filmmakers who really influenced us, David Lynch being the forerunner there [SacredBones reissued the soundtrack to Lynch’s uber-surreal debut, Eraserhead]. We really count that as a blessing and not something we try to take that for granted.”
Are indie labels of that ilk important, then, in terms of defining eras or places? “Yeah, absolutely! It’s a document of what’s happening at the time – I mean, that’s literally what the word ‘record’ means. But I don’t think Caleb ever intended for it to just be that, you know? We have bands now from all over the globe, which is amazing.”
Indeed, it seems the process of bringing acts into the Sacred Bones fold is a shared task: “When we’re looking for new bands, we’ll ask our bands who they like, and we pay a lot of attention to who they’re touring with. We really try to have a community and a lot of our artists work together on releases or just become friends and hang out and do shows together. That’s really special to us.”
That community has since extended to BYM Records, an independent label based in Santiago, Chile, who share elements of their roster with Sacred Bones – specifically trance-tinged krautrockers Föllakzoid and the motorik dreampop of The Holydrug Couple. “It’s their friends’ label,” Brode tells us enthusiastically. “I think two of them are in this band called La Hell Gang, who are amazing – they were touring with Föllakzoid and Holydrug Couple in the United States a couple of years ago, so we hung out with them. They’re really sweet guys and we’re mutual fans of each other.”
This shared love has even extended to one of the highlights of late September, as the two labels jointly curate a stage at the hotly anticipatedLiverpool International Festival of Psychedelia. Placing the likes of Blanck Mass and Destruction Unit alongside South American wonders such as The Ganjas’ stoned fuzz brilliance and the epic Chicos de Nazca, it’s sure to be one of Psych Fest’s greatest spectacles.
This may be one of the biggest “no duh” labels on our list . Though they’ve made a name for themselves as a home for initially smaller artists with big visions, often with stunning visual art components, to grow into true forces, SacredBones aren’t content to rest on their cred, to settle into a comfortable groove. Their output this year took a lot of risks and showed a lot of ambition, and also showed the true care they put as a label into every detail in order to let their artists grow.
Please Seek Out:Jenny Hval: Apocalypse, girl; Institute, Catharsis; Destruction Unit, Negative Feedback Resistor; Rose McDowall, Cut With the Cake Knife; The Holydrug Couple, Moonlust
The most off-putting part about Frankie Cosmos (aka Greta Kline) is that she’s still at twenty-one years old has been able to write and record and release a staggering amount of songs, EPs, and albums over the course of the past five or so years. Every 17-year-old girl, whether they’re the child of famous parents, living in New York City, and already a part of the DIY music scene, or growing up in suburbs of Washington, D.C., balancing high school field hockey practices and college applications (guess which one is me) is going through the same sort of confusion and trying to figure out who they are and what’s their place in the world.
At the beginning of her music “career” – I use quotes not to lessen her, but because Kline herself is not always apt to describe herself as a professional musician – Frankie Cosmos, or even Ingrid Superstar as she first called herself, would simply write a few lyrics, put it to some easy chords and record, upload to Bandcamp and repeat. It’s the same way that we write a few tweets a day or maybe write a page or two in a diary or a blog post detailing our days. At this point, she boasts something close to 35 albums/EPs/collections of songs on her autobiographical bandcamp page.
It wasn’t until her first official full-length, Zentropy, that Frankie Cosmos got attention outside of the greater-New York City area DIY/indie scene. Released on SUNY Purchase’s Double Double Whammy (which now operates primarily out of Brooklyn), the album received critical acclaim for Kline’s honest lyrics and unique voice. After releasing a few short EPs via bandcamp after Zentropy, Kline released a single from Fit Me In, “Sand,” before releasing another track “Young,” before releasing the under eight-minute, four-song EP at the start of November.
Despite the addition of synths and electronic sounds instead of the familiar organic instruments, Fit Me In still maintains the sense of simplicity that propelled the band forward in the first place. In an interview with Vulture, Kline says that hearing her voice over a poppier beat it still strange, compared to the more rock-oriented music that she’s used to playing and recording. Still, it works. She also mentions her nervousness that her age (she was 19 when Zentropy was released) was her main selling point, and now that she’s the ripe-old age of 21, the novelty has worn off.
“Young,” the second song on the EP speaks to this worry, as her delicate vocals shimmer over 80s-esque keyboard synths and drums, tongue-in-cheek singing, “and have you heard that I’m so young?” She recognizes how she skipped over parts of growing up: “I heard about being young/but I’m not sure how it’s done.” By the end of the song though, she seems to have comes to terms with her age, singing, “I just want to be alive that’s it.”
Though clocking in just under a minute, EP-closer “Sand” tells a tender story of being in love in New York City. No matter how cold-hearted you are, either because of heartbreak with a person or with the city, the song will get to you in a way that nearly every songwriter hopes. Kline is inspired by Frank O’Hara’s poetry, which often tells stories of every day New York life. In “Sand,” she takes a lead from O’Hara, naming places like The Strand bookstore that everyday New Yorkers have visited at some point in their lives. There are few places like New York City that make a person feel so dead inside, but, at the same time, the city teems with excitement, liveliness, and love, as “Sand” so perfectly expresses.
Fit Me In is sonically surprising, lyrically mature, and a logical step forward as Frankie Cosmos looks to release their first LP on Bayonet Records in early 2016. If this EP is any sign – and I’m sure it is – the band will soon be recognized for much more than just Kline’s age.
The band had split during the narcotic mayhem of the 41 date 75/76 tour, where Gregg testified in the trial of security man to the Allmans Scooter Herring resulting in the latter’s 75 year prison sentence. Leavell, Williams and Jaimoe continued with Sea Level, Dickey Betts formed Great Southern and Allman founded the Gregg Allman Band. However by 1978 moves were afoot to reunite the band augmented by new guitarist Dangerous Dan Toler & bassist David Goldflies to record the “Enlightened Rogues” album & return to the road. The new line up is captured, in revitalised form, at the Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, NY on the 30th December 1979 & broadcast by WLIR-FM.
Tracklist 1/Don’t Want You No More 2/ Not My Cross To Bear 3/Can’t Take It With You 4/Blue Sky 5/Need Your Love So Bad 6/Blind Love 7/Crazy Love 8/Just Ain’t Easy 9/In Memory of Elizabeth Reed 10/Try It One More Time 11/One Way Out 12/Statesboro Blues 13/Southbound 14/Jessica 15/Whipping Post 16/Pegasus 17/Midnight Rider 18/Will The Circle Be Unbroken 19/Ramblin’ Man.
Tempers “Undoing” from the album “Services”, out October 23rd
After performing atBerghain for a special showcase at Popkultur Berlin, a festival that including the core members of New Order, Viv Albertine, and more, Eddie and Jasmine of Tempers came over to my studio to due a quick interview in promotion of their new record “Services” out now on Berlin Record Label AUFNAHME+WIEDERGABE.
Tempers are from New York City, and their music is a refreshing integration of classic new wave sensibilities channeled through 90’s revival ala classic Garbage and Curve. The first time I heard of Tempers was at this past summer’s Wave Gotik Treffen, the world’s largest Gothic/Wave festival in Leipzig Germany. Tempers are Jasmine Golestaneh and Eddie Cooper. Pick up their album “Services”—out now at AUFNAHME+WIEDERGABE
Trying to convey irony or sarcasm in the Facebook profile’s “Short Description” box is one of this Brooklyn bands’ favorite hobbies. Indie rockers NARC TWAIN do so by wrapping the word band in quotes: ‘ Narc Twain is a “band” Well, quotes or no quotes, they certainly sound like a “band,” and a rather tight and punhcy one for that matter. Yeah because “bands” don’t always sound like bands (or viceversa), in particular when they are sloppy and unawarely out of tune. Something these guys are not. So, yes, Narc Twain The quintet unveiled two singles from their upcoming debut EP, the release of which will be celebrated through a show at the Knit in New York City on December 3rd. Their sound seems to incarnate the paradox of a fast and furious – and sometimes dissonant – band led by a… “gentleman.” After the fierce intro of “Downhill,” we were all expecting the guttural scream of a rabid lead singer, but were instead surprised by Tommy Siegel’s (of Jukebox the Ghost fame) power pop style delivery. This inconsistency kind of works though, shifting the band’s sound towards a sonic terrain poppier than we had anticipated.
1977 TOM PETTY broadcast from MY FATHER S PLACE, NEW YORK, After gaining local popularity in Gainesville, Florida with his band Mudcrutch, Tom Petty hooked up with The Heartbreakers (Mike Campbell, guitar; Benmont Tench, keyboards; Stan Lynch, drums; Ron Blair, bass), went to L.A., signed to Leon Russell s Shelter Records, and cut Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, the debut album released in 1976. Although Petty, as the primary singer and songwriter (and a solid rhythm guitarist), deserved top billing, The Heartbreakers (at the time causing some confusion as ex New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan in tandem with Television s Richard Hell were calling their new group the same name) were a great band in their own right, Campbell and Tench (also fine songwriters) in particular being much sought after session players. Anyway, TomPetty and co. were unique in 1976 in that they didn t really have an image beyond being a really good 60s influenced (The Beatles and The Byrds most obviously) rock n roll band; while trends such as punk and new wave came and went, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers have always done their own thing. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers was a solid debut album that, like much of their consistently strong output, is primarily remembered for its singles: Breakdown , American Girl and Anything That s Rock N Roll . The group supported Nils Lofgren in Europe during the summer of 1977 but returned to the US for the fall and played a number of shows as headliners including the gig presented on this CD, on Long Island, New York at the famous My Father s Place venue on 29th November. Largely pulling tracks form their debut and sophomore albums (You re Going To Get It would come out in May 1978) they also covered two 1960s classics in the form of Shout and Route 66 , alongside an early version of a song that wouldn t receive its studio album debut until the release of Southern Accents in 1985, the wonderfully titled Petty/Campbell composition Dogs on the Run . What this fine show, broadcast as it was on WMIR FM New York, illustrates nicely and to full effect is that while Tom and the Boys were largely influenced by the music of the previous decade they were not immune to the energy and dynamism of the punk and new wave genres then making waves in the UK, Europe and in New York, and this show reveals a unit as tight and punchy as any then knocking em dead at CBGB s or at London s Vortex club.
I Need To Know
American Girl
Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)
Malka,are a band out of NYC, their press release does a much better job than me of explaining what you are about to listen to. Malka are a band laying down some sweet psychedelic dreampop….
psych dream-gazers MALKA debut EP The Constant State
New York City-based psychedelic dreampop band MALKA present their debut EP, The Constant State. Recorded at both APT Studio (NYC) and Elohino studio (NJ), mixed by Darko Saric, and mastered at 825 Studios by Grammy Award-winning engineer Butch Jones (Madonna, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop, The Gun Club, B-52s), The Constant State takes listeners on a genre-melding journey, ebbing and flowing through the realms of dreampop, post-rock, nugaze, and psychedelic rock.
The songs are evocative both musically and lyrically, touching on metaphysical, existential and interpersonal subject matter with an honesty that resonates to an emotional core. Their music is a reflection of the triumph and tragedy of the world, compelling us to look deeper into the realms of our consciousness. Malka is trying to stretch the concept of songs to make them sound more like emotional lapses of time.
I am assuming that Rory fans would want to know one thing first and foremost about this release: what does it sound like? Good. It sounds good. Very good indeed.
Radio show recordings are sprouting like mushrooms in the woods these days and buyers are frequently ignorant of sound quality, which can and does vary enormously between releases. Most carry little or no information and company description of content on the product or Amazon’s website can vary from irrelevant to non-existent. Also beware of the same show being released under different names by different companies.
According to the sparse information provided with this release, this recording is from a radio show taped at ‘My Father’s Place’ in Roslyn on Long Island on September 7th 1979 while Rory toured his ‘Top Priority’ album with Gerry McAvoy and Ted McKenna as his rhythm section. The sound quality is amongst the top end of that of other radio show recordings I have. The band are cooking, without a doubt, and the balance between vocals and instruments is good. There is an awkward, rapid fade at the end of the penultimate track of disc two as the track goes into a bass solo and then the sound quickly comes back in for the final track. Remember, these are live recordings without overdubs or re-recordings added later and there was doubtless some radio station editing to fit the performance into a time slot for broadcast. With the quality of this trio of road warriors, though, there need be no fear that they supply anything but a very good, truly live performance.
This is prime Rory Gallagher. This set shows what the sonic capabilities of the electric guitar sound like in the hands of a master. The trio (including Ted McKenna-drums and Gerry McAvoy-bass) play tight, loud, no-holds-barred music in the best tradition of a rock n’ roll trio. At times Gallagher sounds like he’s been plugged into an over-charged battery that’s been switched to full-on, in-the-red, over-loaded power. Listen to anything here (even the acoustic “Too Much Alcohol” or “Pistol Slapper Blues”) and you’ll hear a man whose focused on giving the audience his very best. This is one of those sets where every song has something to recommend it. The passion, the fire, the very electricity that powers this concert has to be heard.
The sound is very good–better than you would expect. The trio can be easily heard with Rory Gallagher’s guitar out front where it belongs. And yes, this music could easily fit on one CD. Obviously the label wanted to make as much money as they could from this release, and the music actually sounds better on one disc–there’s no interruptions in the flow and excitement–so that’s kind of a bummer. And the “notes” (there’s no booklet) are pretty anonymous (“…give a listen to Rock Beat Records “Irishman In New York”), adding very little to this great set.
But if you’re a fan of Gallagher and/or the electric guitar you need to hear this. Gallagher even does an intense version of Frankie Ford’s 1950’s era “Sea Cruise” like you’ve never heard before. This new release from way back in 1979 can easily sit next to whatever you think is the best live Gallagher recording you own. And it might just wipe up the floor with it. It’s that good.
Track Listing: Disc 1
Shin Kicker (3:38)
Last of the Independents (5:40)
Keychain (5:52)
Moonchild (5:10)
The Mississippi Sheiks ( 5:45)
I Wonder Who? (7:47)
Tattoo’d Lady (5:09)
Too Much Alcohol (3:47)
Pistol Slapper Blues (3:02) Disc 2
Shadow Play (5:42)
Bought & Sold (4:59)
Walk On Hot Coals (5:26)
Messin’ With The Kid (5:22)
Bullfrog Blues (2:50) [Quick fade out to avoid bass solo]
Sea Cruise (2:58)
The Fat Angel Sings 