Album Review: The Streetwalkin' Cheetahs - "One More Drink"

 

One of the more unexpected but nevertheless welcome returns of the year so far, Los Angeles natives the Streetwalkin' Cheetahs were the great should have beens of the whole all-too-brief glam-punk explosion of the noughties. Drawing from the same Dolls/Ramones/Hanoi Rocks influences as a lot of the pack around them but utilising them with a lot more savvy than nearly all of their contemporaries, they produced a glorious run of albums in the early years of the decade (Guitars, Guns And God and Waiting For The Death Of My Generation being particularly good) before general apathy sunk them before they'd really managed to get going.

Eighteen years later and frontman Frank Meyer has reunited the band for another go and I'm pleased to report that One More Drink is a good comeback effort from the band. While the likes of Fast, Fucked And Furious and The Rejected have the requisite Supersuckers style assault you'd maybe come to expect, there's a lot more to this album than that. Opener Ain't It Summer is a pure singalong gem that recalls the Ramones' later output when they progressed beyond their three chord origins into slightly more complex but still addictively singalongable territory while We Are The Ones sounds like a power pop rewrite of the Icicle Works' Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream) and works really well as a summer anthem in waiting.

To be honest, this album swings between so many different styles that it's difficult to keep up sometimes but Christ, this band are good at it. Rumblin' Train and Warzone are the sort of gloriously simple AC/DC riff-fests that the likes of Airbourne wish they could do and the Stonesy strut of Let Me Out pisses nitro on pale imitators like the Dust Coda before casually chucking a match on them then swaggering off laughing evilly. The title track is the sort of song that you can just see going down an absolute storm - in a just world, it'd be igniting sell out crowds at enormodomes up and down the country like wot Aerosmith and Van Halen used to do in the '70s - in fact, why the hell isn't it is what I want to know. By the time Switchblade Knights crashes things to a close sounding like Electric/Sonic Temple era Ian Astbury fronting the Quireboys, you'll have been converted. I guarantee it.

Listen, I'm gonna put this simply. There are people who get good rock 'n' roll and people who don't. And if you're the sort of person who appreciates the good stuff - the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Sticky Fingers era Stones, AC/DC around Dirty Deeds and Powerage, Hanoi Rocks, the Dictators, the Supersuckers, the Cult's Electric, early '70s Alice Cooper, Guns 'n' Roses at their rawest, you know what I'm talking about - then you bloody well need this album in your life now. It's very rare we ever give full marks on this here webzine but this bugger well and truly deserves it.

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NITE SONGS RATING: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕 (10/10)