This is your one time warning; prepare for your lungs to burst and veins to pop not forgetting hips to feverishly swing, rumble bop freakabillys Oh! Gunquit are back in town to tease and incite with a new album. The London based outfit left bodies sweaty, exhausted, and lustful with their first album Eat Yuppies and Dance back in 2015 but be warned it will all have felt like a warm up compared to the devilish antics Lightning Likes Me will have you getting up to.
Hints of things to come were alive in the band’s recent single Nomads Of The Lost, a track which suggested that the quintet had found wilder and even more salacious essences in their songwriting and sound; something Lightning Likes Me quickly and increasingly confirms song after song. It should be of no surprise really, since emerging in 2010/11 from the creative union of vocalist/trumpeter Tina Swasey and guitarist/vocalist Simon Wild, the band has only raised the ante and revelry of their psych-surf/garage-punk infused rock ‘n’ roll. With its members in bassist VV, drummer Alex De Renzi and newest member Chuchi Malpersona on sax alongside Swasey and Wild hailing from Italy, USA, Colombia, Spain, and the UK, there is a cosmopolitan fever to their music which in turn encourages its trickery to new heights, a plateau now set very high within Lightning Likes Me.
As soon as the fiery guitar strokes of opener So Long Sucker finger ears, the album is up and running, toning and driving the body like a puppeteer. Brass and rhythms are soon blazing and stomping across the infectious proposal, Swasey’s enthusiasm soaked vocals equally as persuasive while clad in defiance and carnal incitement. The track continues to twist and bounce like a rock ‘n’ roll dervish, every second getting under the skin and into the bones.
It is a tremendous start instantly backed up by the rhythmically tenacious antics of Get Wound Up. As De Renzi’s swings land with boisterous dexterity, sax and trumpet blaze away with suggestion and heat with Swasey all the while leaping across every strand of temptation with vocal agility. It is a song which dares you to get physically involved note by note, an invitation impossible to refuse in limb and energy before both are consumed all over again by the outstanding Nomads Of The Lost. With a swagger in its hips and confidence, the song saunters in with flirtatious infectiousness oozing from every note and syllable. Taunting riffs and sax teasing leads the way as vocals again ride the canter with their own irresistible persuasion, group calls another subsequent tempting impossible not to join as the chorus infests. Not for the last time, there are hints of bands like The Revillos and The Creeping Ivies to the devilry; bewitching essences in a captivation all of the Oh! Gunquit making.
Fireballs boogies in ears next with its garage rock psyche pop, its crescendo building surges a deceptive pleasure as they never erupt into a full-on blaze, just into the next cycle of irrepressible teasing for its own heat soaked orgasmic pleasure while Never Sorry plunders the decades for its psyche infesting rock ‘n’ roll, flirting with the inspirations of artists like the 5678’s and April March along the way. Both tracks are sheer addiction in the making though that equally applies to the whole of the album including the thicker boned Suzy Don’t Stop. The rhythmic bullying is raw feet temptation whilst the fire borne strains of guitar and brass are delicious toxins in the virulence of song and vocal exhortation.
The garage punk ‘n’ roll voodoo of Smiling Snake is a fifties bred, freshly re-animated thrill; a Wanda Jackson and Imelda May blended suggestion bound in the stringed imagination of Poison Ivy and quite irresistible though just as attention and lust is quickly stolen by it from its predecessor it is then lost to Walking The Streets which too has more than a rich spicing of The Cramps to its personality. Its creative stroll is manna to the passions and an unforgiving consumption of the hips, leading them to delirium soaked exhaustion. The track simply takes over body and spirit and take it from us just gets more potent and masterful with every groove woven outing.
Next up is Greasy Moves which, without credit on its press release or in any additional digital information sought so far, features guest vocals from someone which sounds inimitably like King Salami. The initial stomp of guitar and brass with rhythms swinging turns into a sweltering stroll of salacious suggestion, a primal dance which again has the ears and body locked into its blue kissed flirtation with no sign of resistance.
Finishing off the album with its own infernal devouring is Captain Of the Creeps; an incessant nagging of senses and limbs woven into a tapestry of iniquitous imagination and enterprise. It pretty much sums up all the attributes found across the whole of the unique rock ‘n’ roll contagion that is Lightning Likes Me, adding a few more of its own as the album leaves in rousing style though not for long as the urge to start the merciless party off again is king.
Last time around Oh! Gunquit gave us one of the best outings of the year this time it just might be the very best; there are few contenders to rival it for sure.
Lightning Likes Me is out now via Decapitator and Dirty Water Records https://ohgunquit.bandcamp.com/album/lightning-likes-me-lp-cd
https://www.facebook.com/ohgunquit/
Pete RingMaster 26/09/2017
Copyright RingMaster: MyFreeCopyright
Hot Cross Fun only confirmed and pushed their rising stature which Nomads Of The Lost, recorded with producer Jim Diamond, undoubtedly gives another potent nudge to. Opener Nomads Of The Lost strolls in with brass aflame amidst swaggering rhythms, teasing and flirting with ears before Tina’s infectious vocal stroll grabs its fair share of attention. Continuing to swerve around the senses in sound and energy as grooves entice and rhythms urge bodily participation, the song sizzles and insatiably dances like a warped The Revillos on heat.
It opens up with its title track, The Witch House flirting through the voodoo rhythms the band has so masterfully transfixes with from day one. Where Mr Destruction’s beats used to transmit intent and resonance like a virus through ear and bone though, Duncan’s beats are more tempered to match the, dare we say mellower, tones of the music yet cast an equally lingering network of anthemic persuasion. Murray’s guitar is just as swift in its spicy coaxing as her recognisable and exhilarating vocal shrills and punkish tone. Completed by the dark rumble of Taylor’s bass, the song swings with attitude and a flirtatious swagger ripe with simple but deeply rooting Ramones seeded hooks and nostalgia bred chords. The track is scintillating revelry to start things off but just the beginning of great deeds.
With a line-up completed by Kieran, VV, and Alex, Oh! Gunquit equip Eat Yuppies and Dance with a torrential revelry which can fall into anything from psyche rock and pop to garage and punk rock, and on again to rockabilly and surf rock and that is still only part of the full musical stomp which starts with opener Sinkhole. The resonating slightly tinny beats which accost and incite ears from the first breath of the song are the sign of things to come, their anthemic lure having one single aim with their actions, to ignite body and emotions. Vocals jump in swiftly with the same impact before the song slips into a sultry groove woven caress of surf temptation over a vivacious garage rock canvas. The voice of Denver bred Tina brings an enticing tang to the exploit as does the acidic kiss of guitar enterprise which flames across the encounter, everything combining for a potent and lively start to the album.
magnetically and vibrantly compelling mind of the fictional character of its creator, employing everything and anything from industrial and steampunk to gothic rock and progressive metal, and that is just scratching the surface. With many of the tracks co-written with Gary ‘Stench’ Mason, The Shanklin Freak Show guitarist and provider of the majority of the guitar invention across the release, the album immediately lures in senses and imagination with the opening spoken narrative leading in the title track. It instantly intrigues as the scene setting premise strolls into the irresistible stomp of the song. Rhythms bounce around with a heavy mischievous gait matched by the electro and bass taunting whilst the guitar casts lines of sonic and melodic bait which is pure infectious toxicity. Best described as Dr. Jekyll meets ICP as early Marilyn Mansion helps Victor Frankenstein create aural life for them to toy with upon a set designed by Willy Wonka, the track is a delicious fascination and the first irresistible hint of the lunacy to come.
