Cut In The Hill Gang: Mean Black Cat

The garage cats that got the double cream.

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According to Cut In The Hill Gang’s MySpace profile, the mood they are currently in is ‘crazy’. Yep, we can hear that on this all-covers blues-funk-rock- freakout. So who’s making this soul-shaking, throat-mangling, mashed-potato racket?

Cincinatti’s Johnny Walker, vocalist with garage rock hotshots Soledad Brothers and his mongrel back-up. This is a man who knows a thing or two about garage and R&B, and this album started as a tribute 7-inch but was too good to waste.

Ripping through a ten-song shockwave of tracks by MC5, John Lee Hooker, Gary US Bonds, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Spaceman 3, it’s a surly, rock’n’souling punch in the gut, sometimes Yardbirds, sometimes Bo Diddley, always 1000 per cent conviction. It breathes down your neck. It screams in your face. That’s what they aimed for – and it sounds awesome.

Catch their next album on – of course – their old mucker Jack White’s label, Third Man.

Jo Kendall
Jo Kendall

Jo is a journalist, podcaster, event host and music industry lecturer with 23 years in music magazines since joining Kerrang! as office manager in 1999. But before that Jo had 10 years as a London-based gig promoter and DJ, also working in various vintage record shops and for the UK arm of the Sub Pop label as a warehouse and press assistant. Jo's had tea with Robert Fripp, touched Ian Anderson's favourite flute (!), asked Suzi Quatro what one wears under a leather catsuit, and invented several ridiculous editorial ideas such as the regular celebrity cooking column for Prog, Supper's Ready. After being Deputy Editor for Prog for five years and Managing Editor of Classic Rock for three, Jo is now Associate Editor of Prog, where she's been since its inception in 2009, and a regular contributor to Classic Rock. She continues to spread the experimental and psychedelic music-based word amid unsuspecting students at BIMM Institute London, hoping to inspire the next gen of rock, metal, prog and indie creators and appreciators.