Exile Parade - "Fire Walk With Me" b/w "Still Number One" (Self-Release - Single 2008)

First of all, I'd like to thank Warrington, UK's Exile Parade for sending me 25 copies of their new single "Fire Walk With Me". I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do with such largesse, but I can't fault them for their generosity. I would hand them out to my friends, but my phone hasn't rung anywhere near 25 times since I quit drinking. Just goes to show - never quit drinking. Never.

The cool thing about "Fire Walk With Me" is that, while it instantly brings the word "Mudhoney" to mind, it seems to be drawing more from the same source material that inspired Mudhoney rather drawing inspiration from Mudhoney itself. The similarities are glaring, but Exile Parade, on this song at least, brings its own distinctive spin to the melange of influences that came to fall under the umbrella term "grunge". The production, credited to Owen Morris, is cleaner than Jack Endino's (which, in my opinion, is no bad thing), the fuzz lead guitar riff is equal parts Wayne Kramer/Ron Asheton, and lead singer Lomax [sic] has a gravelly shout that occasionally slips into Lemmy Kilmeister territory. In short this song would not sound out of place in a "grunge" specialty show on late 80's college radio. It would fit so well because, as mentioned above, these guys seem to have a reverence for The Stooges, The MC5, and other bands that led to the rise of "grunge" as a sub-genre rather than for "grunge" itself. This makes for "Fire Walk With Me" being a fine little listen.

It's the b-side where things get a little confusing.

While I'm certainly no opponent of bands displaying their diversity I'm not sure that a two song single is necessarily the proper venue to span two opposite extremes. In the context of singles, a band should play to their strengths in exploring a certain musical style, and save the surprise of displaying their strengths in exploring another for the next single. The early Rolling Stones were masters of this (or, depending on who you believe, Andrew Loog Oldham was).

Exile Parade shifts gears dramatically for b-side "Still Number One". The aural assault of the a-side has been traded in for a much poppier sound that is honestly more reminiscent of mid-80's Big Country or, while hailing from America, the heavily British influenced The Call than big, loud, in your face rock. It's not a bad song by any means - it's just a jarring shift in style, especially in a CD format in which it follows immediately on the heels of the aggressive energy of "Fire Walk With Me". It might work a little better on vinyl, in which there's the necessary delay of flipping the record over, but I'm not convinced even that would be enough.

I'll be interested to hear Exile Parade's upcoming full length to see if they integrate the two styles more smoothly, or even make a greater diversity of sounds work. For this single, while the songs are solid and show promise, they don't really seem to indicate a direction. If these boys can get that niggling detail worked out they may just be a force to be reckoned with.

2.5 out of 4 parades

Psychic Drive - "Cartoon Christ" EP (Riot US 2007)

I knew I had heard of "Lizzy" Lee Vincent before. It took me a while to bring it back, but really listening to the new EP from Psychic Drive finally jarred things back into place.

Evoking an atmosphere that The Jesus and Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen, or even The Stooges and The Ramones, would be comfortable breathing, New York based Psychic Drive's Cartoon Christ ultimately is a logical extension of an earlier Vincent project called Birdland.

Birdland emerged from the Birmingham, UK music scene in the late 80's and made a brief splash on the other side of the pond, being widely compared to the four bands in the paragraph above. I stumbled across them in '91 or '92 accidentally as a college radio DJ - I don't remember what I was looking for in the "B's" that day, but I remember seeing their record and spinning it (I routinely forget where I'm going on my way to pick up my daughter, but I remember shit like this and the fact that Lee Vincent was a member of the band. God bless a mis-spent youth). The comparisons were apt ones, with more of an emphasis on the poppier side of things with just a shade of the swagger of The Stooges or The Ramones. Even though I was expending a lot of energy on the Amphetamine Reptile roster at that time (I probably saw The Cows every time they played in Austin in spite of the fact that I never liked them enough to buy one of their records) I've always been a sucker for post-punk Brit-pop. When you add the fact that the derision I received from some other DJs for liking Birdland made me an iconoclast among inconoclasts it was inevitable that I become a lifelong fan, at least for the next few weeks. I hadn't thought about them since.

Psychic Drive more evenly balances the pop sensibilites of Brit-pop with the swagger of Detroit or NYC. The production on Cartoon Christ is polished enough to emphasize the melody and structure of the songs without detracting from the Vincent's fuzz guitar attack, while Kristen Black and Connie Yin drive the rhythm mercilessly on bass and drums respectively. Vincent's vocals are comfortably out in front of the mix, and are equal parts Ian McCulloch, Jim and William Reid, and Joey Ramone. All of this is presented in songs which are all hook - the verses grab you, the choruses are fist pumping and sing-along friendly, and the middle eights are more than after thoughts. There's a distincly Phil Spector-ish element at work which, of course, is never a bad thing. Well, at least not in the context of pop music.

While you might get the impression from reading this that Psychic Drive is derivative, and in a way they are, it hardly counts against them. With the post-punk revival in full swing there can be an almost generic quality to many bands drawing from the same influences - a trap that Psychic Drive manages to avoid by just being so damn good at it. There's nothing wrong with wearing your influences on your sleeve as long as you're wearing them well.

This is a pretty short review, but it's a pretty short EP. Four tracks total - really three, as tracks 1 and 4 are two different version of the title track, the only noticable difference being one is a couple of minutes longer than the other. It's defininitely worth checking out. I'll be interested to see what these three do next. I'll also be interested to see if the current renewed interest in post-punk serves them as well as it should. They ceratinly deserve it as much, if not more, than a lot of the bands out there claiming the influence.

You can fing Psychic Drive at www.myspace.com/psychicdrive.

3 out of 4 nostalgic middle aged bloggers.