Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Star Maker Debuts: Garage Rock Revivalists


Eagles of Death Metal: San Berdoo Sunburn

[purchase]

The Libertines: I Get Along

[purchase]

Larrikin Love: Six Queens

[purchase]

I'm not sure if any of my previous posts would lead you to recognize my seekrit love of a genre known as "garage rock revival," which seems to be an overarching category encompassing a lot of plain fun and loud music best played from a car stereo. Here's a batch of 'em: one American and two British groups from the mid- …er, what are we calling the last decade anyway? The aughts? The 00's? At any rate, all of these groups are new to SMM (and all make our cutoff of 2005 and before).

Eagles of Death Metal is Josh Homme's other group (the first one is Queens of the Stone Age). He partnered up with a childhood soccer buddy for this combo, in what he describes as "bluegrass slide guitar mixed with stripper drum beats and Canned Heat vocals." It's pure California—the "Eagles" irreverently references the pop/rock group, not the bird.

Pete Doherty, vocalist of the British band the Libertines, kept the tabloids cranking for several years when he was 1) dating Kate Moss and 2) getting serially arrested for abuse of what the Brits call Class A drugs (mostly of the opiod family). He and bandmate Carl Barat had a long-standing, emo-chaotic bromance often reflected in their lyrics. Amidst all the scandals, they managed to release two fine albums before their messy implosion.

Fellow Brits Larrikin Love only managed one album, and they never made the tabloids at all before they called it quits. Still, I really like this frenzied tale of a bloke who's a self-admitted "cherry-lipped little cheap tart"; what I imagine Walk on the Wild Side would sound like as a full-blown punk tune.

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