Easy Action - Drop The Bomb
A feisty farewell from Scando glam veterans Easy Action. Once touted as Sweden’s answer to Hanoi Rocks, this track is a taster for an album that was started in 2009 but is now unlikely to see the light of day. The video — rather confusingly — was shot three years previously.
Electric Guitars - Swagman
Beginning with a series of chords that sound like an attempt to summon Beelzebub from the very depths of Hades, Swagman continues with a greasy, slithering riff as epic as it is crunchy. Denmark’s Electric Guitars claim to specialise in bringing rock’n’roll to the people, and right here they’re bringing it in by the majestic truckfull.
The Mirror Trap - Piranhas
“We are a five piece rock’n’roll band called The Mirror Trap,” say the Mirror Trap. “We like music to be full of heart and soul, blood and guts, sweat and tears, and every other combination of sticky human reality. We like depressing books, lipstick and bad dancing.” Which is fine by us, as it’s how many great bands start.
Kaleo - Way Down We Go
Way Down We Go is currently the soundtrack to the TV campaign for Boots No.7, which is apparently a range of skincare products. We know nothing of such things, but we’re impressed by the scale and sweep of the song, which slowly builds into the kind of brooding, cinematic epic that conjures up images of bleak, windswept landscapes and cold, rolling seas. Although perhaps we’re just saying that because we know they’re from Iceland.
Well Hung Heart - Touch The Sky
If you’ve got Google cardboard or another 360° viewer, get your mother-loving eyeballs around this mother-loving eyeball bonanza. For Touch The Sky is filmed entirely in all-encompassing three hundred and sixty degree excito-vision, and watching it is akin to being trapped in the video itself as all sorts of mayhem explodes around your head in every possible direction. Warning: also contains hard rockin’ riffs.
Crash Midnight – Roxy
A tribute to Boston’s notorious Combat Zone - an area of the city now home to well-to-do trustafarians - Roxy is a thudding hunk of rock’n’roll filth with an attitude that appears to have been piped in from about 1985 without being tainted by anything more recent along the way. It’s sleazy, it’s very much NSFW, and you probably know what that means.
yllwshrk - Pull Me Under (In Memory Of Jeff Buckley)
Yes the band name looks like the 1993 Frank Zappa album (The Yellow Shark) in text-speak, but yllwshrk’s homage to Jeff Buckley is a very fully-formed thing. Made by the violinist and double bass player from Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool (they swap the strings for guitars here), this commanding tune channels complex, classically minded roots into a brooding, innovative rock frame.
Winery Dogs – Captain Love
Messrs Kotzen, Sheehan and Portnoy return with a song the drummer is convinced will be a hit in strip clubs, and one listen to that swaggering, sultry riff suggests he’s right on point. “Woah woman!” the lyrics proclaim, “I’ll be your captain on this ride!” Dunno about that, but we’ve just installed a pole, so we’re clearly headed in the right direction.
