Album Review: The Lords Of Altamont - "Turn On, Tune In, Electrify!"

 

Still very much out there and kicking two decades into their career, this is no less than the Lords of Altamont's seventh album and finds them kicking out the jams as only they can. Yes, they remain a band firmly rooted in the heavier end of psychedelic garage rock but as long as they keep injecting their tunes with the sort of power and urgency that's become their trademark you won't catch me complaining too loudly.

Opener Living With The Squares lays the template down from the off, a frenetic guitars, bass, drums and keys pile-up which reminds me a bit of Mott The Hoople's old proto-punk classic The Moon Upstairs while the similarly heavy Burn Me Out is pure early Deep Purple, maybe with a touch of the Stooges chucked into the mix (indeed, they cover Iggy and co's Lost In The Future elsewhere on this 'un). Million Watts Electrified and the pounding We'll Never Leave This World Alive kick the tempo up even further with their driving guitars and synths and scowled Stonesy lyrics.

There's plenty of other high octane thrills on here with the likes of Blast For Kicksville and Movin' (Goat's Revenge) providing the snotty energy that links the band to groups like the MC5 while the more mid-paced Levitation Mind, Soul In Flames and the epic sludgy six minute closer Mud provide the more psychedelic stoner end of their repertoire owing a sly nod to the likes of Thee Hypnotics and Monster Magnet. I Just Want, meanwhile, sits nicely between the two with its pounding rhythms and mind-blowing synths and snarled vocals.

The Lords of Altamont are never gonna win any awards for originality but at least they infuse their music with the sort of ferocious energy and power that shows they've got a genuine respect for it rather than just lazily ticking off the clichés and you have to respect that. For that well balanced mix of fury and mind-boggling out-thereness, Tune In Turn On Electrify definitely bears seeking out.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more