Michael Monroe Sensory Overdrive
Universal/Spinefarm
Without getting bogged down by the finer points of the multi-page CV that details the history, talent, and accomplishments of each one of the members that make up Michael Monroe’s new super-backing band, it can be said that the Hanoi Rocks frontman has never surrounded himself with such an awesome cast in his entire solo career. With Sammi Yaffa (Hanoi Rocks) on bass, Ginger (The Wildhearts) and Steve Conte (New York Dolls) on guitar, and Karl Rockfist on drums, Monroe has taken care to assemble an ensemble that thrives on friendship, familiarity, tradition, energy, pedigree, and musicianship, and the music reflects that enriched bounty in big, bold ways. Without sacrificing his signature style, which usually involves plenty of harmonica and sax, Monroe ratchets up the power well past pretty pleasure, making Sensory Overdrive a cannon shot of sleaze n’ roll that’s equal parts sparkly pop and heavy punk rock fury. There’s no doubt that Ginger’s sticky fingerprints are all over this one, his hook-ladened influence practically dripping off every riff and chorus like pomegrante syrup laced with arsenic, but it’s the band’s chemistry, punctuated by Monroe’s familiar Norwegian rasp, that pushes this one into the red. Sensory Overdrive is full of so many eyelined hits it’ll make your head spin, and while it does an amazing job of playing to your old school sensibilities, it also stands up as compellingly current. Oh, and bonus points (as if it needed any) for bringing in Lucinda Williams (“Gone Baby Gone”) and Lemmy (“Debauchery as a Fine Art”) to help make this album even more special.
Check out the video for “’78″ from Sensory Overdrive!
Even though they hail from the City of Angels, Night Horse carry themselves with that Americana swagger befitting East Coast brawlers, chucking big, dopey, boogie-fried riffs at you like ham-sized fists that leave deep, lasting bruises. Picking up where their 2008 debut, The Dark Won’t Hide You, left off, Perdition Hymns lays the Southern stoner rock on nice n’ thick, incorporating plenty of organ, slide, and 70s-infused boxcar blues to send you on a weed-eating nostalgia trip to Altamont and back. Sure, it’s got all the dusty charm of Skynyrd or the Allmans, and sounds like a nasty mix of Cracktorch and the ‘Crowes, but ultimately (and maybe it’s because of the way singer Sam James Velde howls at the blood red moon) the songs on Perdition Hymns come off as bastard inventions from an alternate universe where Danzig grows up a wayward cowboy and not Lucifer’s brawny spawn.
Harvey Milk A Small Turn of Human Kindness
Hydra Head
A Small Turn of Human Kindness (a title no doubt borrowed from the song of the same name on 1994′s My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be), the latest album from experimental Atlanta rockers, Harvey Milk, is a heavy, self-centered beat down in every sense of the word. The seven songs here move like spilled molasses, forming one big, slow, cohesive flagellation, each blow coming down hard and deliberate amid first-person growls and lamentations, like “I Just Want to Go Home,” “I Am Sick of All This Too,” and “I Alone Got Up and Left.” True to their Milky ways, however, the band manages to nestle some melodic riffs and courteous piano in amongst the deep, dense, disastrous doom, especially on the equally I-themed songs “I Know This is No Place for You,” “I Know This is All My Fault,” and “I Did Not Call Out.” A Small Turn of Human Kindness is tumultuous and temperamental, as all good Harvey Milk albums are wont to be, with a singular, possessive vision that will smother you like a guilty conscience.
Michael Monroe
Night Horse
Harvey Milk