Labels: In The Red
Review by: Andy Malcolm
I’ll spoil the suspense of this review and come straight out in the first line and proclaim this to be one of my top 3 records of the summer. And I am very much looking forward to seeing this band live in August. I can’t really describe too accurately how the Strange Boys sound like, for this is some pretty oddball shit and you’d need to be more familiar with the roots of American rock and roll than I am to understand, which is probably not so hard to be honest. Particularly noteworthy is that the band is fronted by a guy with utterly yokel vocals, you really have to hear them to get a handle on what I am talking about.
The album opens with “Woe is You And Me” which is a total pip and a dandy, setting the mood for the duration. Things then roll along mightly for upwards of half an hour, a mish-mash of old time blues guitar, along side the height of 1950s Yankee high school cool, and 1960s garage unpredictability. The sum of these 3 disparate parts is EEEEEEEEE. From the sunbaked laziness of “For Lack of a Better Face”, to the sublime pop of “Heard You Wanna Beat Me Up” (the lyrics live up to the title), and the gentle rollings of “No Way For A Slave to Behave”, this album has got it all. And that’s just three tracks in a row at the end of the first side.
There is nothing complicated about the Strange Boys music, as they are playing straight forward rock and roll made for the sheer hell of it. Music made by a bunch of guys who look way too youthful to have stumbled across a sound such as this. The influences here are more the domain of bearded music bores, not the curious juvenile, but perhaps that is where we are going wrong, music is best off in the hands of those who don’t really give a shit what anyone else thinks. Folk able to inject the special spark into something that most people should not be venturing near in the first place.
You can knock the current breed of garage (etcetera) bands for being way too backward looking, for copying a past sound right down to the production but why bother – if a band can make a record as awesome as this, isn’t such retrograde thinking to be encouraged? All that is left in your hands is to pick the occasional wheat from the rather dominant chaff, and the Strange Boys have made that easy for you by kicking out an LP of such bloody minded goodness. Investigate!