Sometimes, when you look around the Classic Rock office, you'll find each member of staff engrossed in a different bit of music, with multiple sets of headphones clamped to multiple sets of skulls. These eight tracks are the results of that listening. We hope you enjoy them.
Danko Jones - Gonna Be A Fight Tonight When Danko Jones played the Motorhead Motorboat, we wrote “Danko Jones should be huge… You can see why Motorhead love them. They should be bigger in the UK. Classic Rock should write about them more.” So that’s what we’re doing. New single Gonna Be A Fight Tonight is a thrashing monster of a song, a great chunky beast stuffed with hooks and a chorus so large it might eat your house.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Satan Speeds Up It’s the second week in a row we’ve featured KG&TLW, but this is a new track, and it makes us fear for their very safety. So immersed are they into deep, terrifying psychedelia that we’d seriously consider sealing our stomachs if they invited us to a party.
Butch Walker - 21+ This is a lovely, haunting acoustic ballad that makes us feel lonelier that that sheep that got lost a few years ago in New Zealand and wasn’t shorn for several years and then got found again and became famous and met the Prime Minister before eventually getting his hair cut on an iceberg. His name was Shrek. The excellent guitar solo is by the famous actor Johnny Depp.
Blueneck - Counting Out Gorgeous opening track off of new album King Nine, out earlier this week. Reading the lyrics to this will probably make you cry, as they’re terribly sad. But the stirring post-rock surrounding them is really rather uplifting and more-ish. Well lush.
Mabel Greer’s Toyshop - Electric Funeral Enough of all this nu-psych malarkey. Proto-Yes paisley-wearers Mabel Greer’s Toyshop have partly re-formed after 46 years and thanks to Yes acolyte Billy Sherwood this 1968 track has been buffed up and rebooted for 2014’s ears - they’ve also added former Yes bloke Tony Kaye on keys. There’ll be a new album out next March.
Peckham Cowboys - Bromley Girls “Is there life in Peckham?”, sang comedian Alexie Sayle on his 1982 novelty hit Hello John Got A New Motor. It may have taken 32 years to get a creditable answer, but it’s a resounding YES, it would seem, as the Peckham Cowboys slither and swagger their way through this filthy portion of sordid, rollicking R&B. One of them is related to The Queen.
The Peter Ulrich Collaboration - Dark Daddy (feat. Erin Hill) Peter Ulrich used to be the percussionist with moody outfits like Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil, and now he’s back with a new single which is equally moody, but boy, we like it. It’s like a gothic country version of one of the acoustic tracks on Led Zeppelin III, but with a talented ladysinger who sounds a bit like Gillian Welch but isn’t. Because it’s Erin Hill.
De Staat - Down Town This isn’t the Petula Clarke song, but a spooky slice of rock-noir that sounds like what might happen if Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits got together and wrote a musical about a private detective operating in the red light area of a bad town. De Staat is Dutch for ‘The State’, Google Translate tells us.
