CARLOS FERAL- GAME OVER Continue
It wasn’t just Elvis shaking his hips in front of a camera, Little Richard doing jumping splits or Jerry Lee Lewis lighting pianos on fire and pushing them into screaming audiences. Sure, all those things could, potentially, ruin a career.
However, it was much less than could ensure you’d never find another paying gig again, such as turning your guitar too loudly, or, perhaps, even playing “the devil’s interval” at a high school dance.
Thankfully, genres meet little anymore. They’re like ingredients that you find inside a kitchen cupboard. Musicians can choose to mix them up or just add salt to the recipe. The rules have been eliminated, and that’s good news for Carlos Feral.
Remember those 90s bands mixing swing jazz with punk and ska? Did you miss them? We did, and enjoying “Game Over Continue” is the best way to show your appreciation for a style that mixes the grooves of swing, the aggression of punk and a cartoonish, fun-loving nature. Lots of fun to be had by all.
Joe Jennings MVPS – Painkiller
The moment a true prophet arrives, many leave their lives behind and follow them no matter what. This is what happened when Iggy Pop’s The Stooges started making music, I’m told, and the effects are felt to this day.
For one thing, I suppose, this kind of nasty, nihilistic garage-rock driven, ironically, by a powerful life force unwilling to submit to cynicism, confirmed the myth that these sorts of people really existed and that they could tune guitars if forced to do so.
Years later, that kind of music offers the same thrills. It lets you know that somewhere there’s someone letting all the frustration with modern living build up, and then, almost through magic, turns it into a rock n’ roll banishing ritual. This is what Joe Jennings MVPS does here.
You have to imagine that no guitar used on the song “Painkiller” costs more than an old rusty bike, and none of them got out unscathed from the recording process. This is music about having a nervous breakdown, and like the best rock tunes about the subject, it ends up sounding like an absolute blast. It’s a prophetic voice announcing the restart of garage rock as a strategy for survival.
