Album Review: Ravagers - "Badlands"

 

Hailing from Baltimore, the cover of this new album from Ravagers should give you a good idea of the musical contents within. The group contain at least one ex-member of scuzz-pop-punks Biters who were briefly being talked about as the next big thing a decade or so again and former Biters frontman Tuk Smith is on hand to provide production duties here so the signs were certainly promising.

And I'm happy to say the promise is well and truly fulfilled. Badlands contains exactly the sort of sneering scuzzy rock 'n' roll that the Biters showed a bit of promise with but comes at it with that crucial added decade of experience to smooth out the rough bits and a new-found love of Alice Cooper and the Misfits with the freewheeling likes of White Widow and Trespasser packing a lead-lined gut punch to knock you into the middle of next week.

They can vary things up a bit as well - while Sick House and Losing My Grip pummel through with a barrelling Motorhead style aggression and the pounding drums of Nasty Night batter your skull like a sledgehammer, Shake The Reaper is more mid-paced and sounds like some deliciously evil collision between Alice Cooper and Blue Oyster Cult and Blackout is the Ramones after watching too many '80s horror movies. Similarly, So Long is a Dead Boys style anti-smalltown attitude snarl and High On Stress is a sheer nervous breakdown set to music.

It's always good to find new bands to recommend in this 'ere webzine and on the evidence of Badlands, Ravagers are definitely a group who deserve your attention. Scuzzy and nasty the way all great garage-sleaze-punk should be but with a deceptive ear for a melody mixed in there as well, this is definitely an album well worth your time and investment. Go check it out.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
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

Garbage Days Revisited #19 - The Dictators - "Go Girl Crazy!" (1975)

Image
  "Set me free, I might know better when I'm older but till then..."  - The Dictators  - Weekend By some distance the oldest album we've featured in this column so far, I very nearly went for the Dictators' 2001 comeback album DFFD  for this feature similar to what I did with the New York Dolls GDR article a couple of weeks back but after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided it really had to be the group's 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!  just because it's arguably the great trailblazing US punk album that everyone's forgotten about. I guess that you could almost say that if the Ramones were the Sex Pistols of US punk then the Dictators were kind of like the Eddie & The Hot Rods in that they crashlanded just that one year too early to really reap the punk whirlwind when it took off in 1976-77 but if you listen to Go Girl Crazy! , it's got the fingerprints of a lot of bands who'd come along soon afterwards on it, especially da Bruddas. The big ...
Read more