Left Lane Cruiser
-- a two-piece band comprised of
Frederick "Joe" Evans IV
on slide guitar and vocals and
Bren Beck
on drums -- may be from Fort Wayne, IN but they sound like a couple of unhinged punk hillbillies raised on the North Mississippi hill country blues of
R.L. Burnside
and
Junior Kimbrough
. They mine the same sort of modal blues territory but, with half-distorted vocals pushed through what sounds like a shorted-out karaoke mike, they also sound like a lo-fi swampy version of
the Stooges
, all full of rampaging impatience.
Junkyard Speed Ball
is the duo's fourth album (and third for
Alive Records
), and it doesn't deviate at all from the sound of their earlier releases -- this isn't a band much concerned with evolving its sound. That's a good thing, because they make a hell of a lot of noise and pretty much mow through every song with real rock fervor. The opener,
"Lost My Mind,"
is absolutely visceral, and it sets the tone for the whole album -- track after track races forward with the accelerator down, and if it's sometimes hard to tell what
Evans
is scorching his vocal cords to say, well, it's still the blues and we all know what that means. But this isn't woe-is-me blues. It's pissed-off blues. Song after song here clangs away at the end of the junkyard chain, riding
' searing, chiming modal guitar riffs and
Beck
's loose-limbed pounding on the drums.
"Shine"
gallops like a magnificent drunken plow horse, while
"Weed Vodka"
finds
' chiming electric guitar sounding like a clawhammer banjo run through an amp stack set on 11. Nothing is reined in here, and the accumulation of these blasts of hill country tweaks makes this a powerful album, one that replaces clarity with the sheer joy of impassioned noise -- stomp it to death seems to be the motto. Recorded by
Jim Diamond
(who also plays bass here on
"Represent,"
while
John Wesley Myers
of
the Black Diamond Heavies
adds organ and keyboard to four songs) at his
Ghetto Recorders
studio in Detroit, MI,
is another fine outing from a refreshingly direct and uncomplicated band that rocks like a jackhammer. ~ Steve Leggett