A long long time fan of Eric Ambel, Scott Kempner, Manny Caiati and Frank Funaro, from their run of albums in the early 1980s. I still didn’t expect that much from their reunion album, 23 years after they broke up. But I did expect something, I figured less British explosion, more Americana. Good, yes, good. But not great.
From the kick it into gear “When The Drugs Kick In” to the jammed out masterful Neil Young cover “Southern Pacific” this album doesn’t falter for a moment, the guitars are tactile, ringing, powerful -a thing of real beauty and smartness like scalpels of sound and the singing, mostly Kempner but Ambel gets to take over the lead a couple of times, is real rockers belting it out when they aren’t caressing it.
Between the two masterpieces is killer groove after killer groove; “You Can Make A Mistake” brings a whole heaviness to the vibe, the sort of shuddering rhythm guitar Lennon gave to “Come Together”, “Damaged” is rockabilly, but really real rockabilly, you can imagine it being released in 1962 instead of 2013. And “Letter (Unmailed)” with its come on unsaid apparently, “The devil says true love’s a lie, but the devil’s a liar”, is a song so good it seems to have escaped from Lucky Town.
Best of all is “Chicks, Man”, one of the greatest songs by any one in 2013, a brilliant blues which includes the best line of the year by far: “enough is enough is enough” and the second best line of the year “it sucked again, was great again, and once again it sucked”. And by the end, at the end, when death has come to claim him, it emerges as a brilliant blues song for the ages.
This is an album which may now fall out of time, if they had, (and they could have though Kempner has, if anything improved as a songwriter and Eric could not have produced this hard and , swinging for the fences sound) had introduced this album to the world in the late 1980s, there is little doubt it could have propelled them to the outer stratospheres of stardom. Every song is exactly what you want to hear, indeed, and I’ve mentioned Bruce before but it is worth repeating, it has the consistency of prime Bruce, and it sounds so fucking great like prime Bruce used to as well. It sounds like really why we care about rock and roll.
A triumphant return from one of our great rock and roll bands