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"Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People" The Chicken Hawks |
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Kinda like the play on the ol' Cramps' title from about a hundred or so years ago, "Bad Music For Bad People," a shirt I'm still proud to wear from time to time when I wanna make an impression, and here The Chicken Hawks, well if their name don't give something away, nothing else probably will. The tunes do have that certain Rockabilly flair much like the aforementioned Lux-led traveling side show, and I probably wouldn't be off base to suggest these guys pack a bit o' the ol' big top when they hit the scene. They got a lot of that electric twang thing going on, call it slide guitar… I call it irritating after a while yet ya just gotta dig that hollow Gretschky-like sound they got sputtering from the still o' the early sixties… and I was off base a bit before, callin' 'em "guys," which is partly true but we got a little girlie action up front in the form of Betsy Badly and by the looks of things "form" ain't something she's short on! She got a voice too, right outta the Runaway's school of dissent and the more I hear this stuff the more I can move past the backwoods band o' fifth drinking Nashville Pussy novelty act and give 'em some real credence-all in the riff bud, check out "101 Blues," "Darksider," better… and a twist of the old "Lime Ricky," better yet… and I'm still diggin' that sound. Sioux City Suicides could've gone over pretty well at that… Yeah they got the Midwestern thing
going, noteworthy if only for the fact that we hardly The tunes are pretty groovy, I'll give 'em that, don't know how "hard hitting" we're talking here… unless we're stackin' 'em up against those Femmes of the Violent variety, but then again judging by the hapless looks on the faces of the neighbors on the front page, there's something going down here! Released by RAFR Records Review by Vinnie Apicella [va85@columbia.edu] |