You just know if Phil Gammage is involved it is gonna be very very good and the Rebel Factory, another band Phil is involved with on vocals and harp, are very very good. A haunting, brooding hard rock band who sound like a Soundgarden of your dreams,a deep throated hard pushing daymare of a song full of threat and menace.
Off their website:
“The Rebel Factory are Joe Nieves (vocals, guitar); Marc Jeffrey (lead guitar); Roger Stoltz (drums); Dave Croce (bass); and Phil Gammage (vocals, harmonica). “Trigger Me” was masterfully produced by drummer Roger Stoltz and co-written by Joe Nieves and his older brother Gus (now deceased). It’s one of those rare songs where for five minutes the lyrics and music work perfectly in tandem.
“Trigger Me” describes in expressionistic detail what it was like for the two brothers to grow up in the pre-gentrified Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s. “Loisada” as it was known, was not the trendy neighborhood of hipsters and Starbucks as it is now, but an urban jungle where the daily life of a young man was full of dangerous challenges. Joe sings with the true experience and conviction of someone who was there and lived to tell about it. His late brother Gus was one of the casualties of that era and its tough environment. A Vietnam veteran, he returned in the late 70s from his time in the military to find his old neighborhood had almost as much menace as the killing fields of Southeast Asia he had fought in. Loisada was a neighborhood of gang warfare, rampant narcotics, uncontrollable crime, and other dangers. Ultimately, those temptations and their pitfalls cost Gus the ultimate price — his life.
The song is both an ode and tribute to him and all of the others who did not survive the perils and temptations of New York’s gritty Lower East Side of the 1970s and 80s.”
It doesn’t actually sound like the LES in the 80s, maybe the 90s, the sound is too professional, the pain is deep but the arrangement has none of the sloppiness or loose barrelled of punk rock: this is a tough minded blues for grown ups. Well worth listening to.
Grade: B+
