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CLASSIC ROCK RATINGS

Orange Goblin

Rough & Ready, Live & Loud BANDCAMP

Brit-metal grease monkeys in their hairy-arsed glory.

Is it really 25 years since Orange Goblin burst on to the British metal scene, belching booze and fire? Apparently so. This warts-and-even-more-warts live album has been released via Bandcamp to mark the Londoners’ Silver Jubilee. For a band who were built to collapse in a puddle of their own vomit, that’s some going.

The Goblin have never made any bones about their love of Motörhead, and Rough & Ready is their No Sleep Til Hammersmith. The spirit of Lemmy flows through the outlaw boogie of Sons Of Satan and The Wolf Bites Back, singer Ben Ward gargling like the old warrior reborn.

If you’re expecting a pristine 5.1 surround-sound experience, then you’re in the wrong place. But if you’re after swashbuckling heavy metal made by rock’n’roll biker-pirates who are as ugly as the day they were born and proud of it, sign right here. Nobody does it better.

Dave Everley

Liar, Flower

Geiger Counter ONE LITTLE INDIAN

What KatieJane did next.

You’ll remember KatieJane Garside. Although it’s been 28 years since she first exploded into our consciousness as vocalist with Daisy Chainsaw – a startling wide-eyed apparition, partially clad in skimpy rags, surfing on the crest of Love Your Money’s unforgettable hook – she’s hard to forget. Embraced by a mainstream in fresh thrall to Nirvana as reluctant riot grrl poster grrl, Garside split from Daisy Chainsaw as the alt. world lay at her feet. It seemed an insane decision at the time, but, post-Cobain, perhaps not.

While it’s easy to imagine Garside immured in self-imposed exile (a grunge era Miss Havisham), she’s been quietly flourishing. Following Queenadreena’s visceral frenzy, Ruby Throat embraced ever more diaphanous neo-folk. It appeared that Garside had found contentment and sated her scream. But Geiger Counter sees the return of KatieJane as lightning conductor.

Following a calm-before-the-storm opener, My Brain Is Lit Like An Airport unleashes a deluge of roaring post-Fall delirium. There’s a distinct aroma of Mark E Smith about proceedings as Chris Whittingham tumbles down surprising scales, and as moods swing from Broken Light delicacy to Even Through The Darkest Clouds stridency, all indications suggest that KatieJane’s time has come. Again.

Ian Fortnam

Wino

Forever Gone RIPPLE MUSIC

The king of American doom goes soulfully solo.

Despite generally singing about the crushing futility of things, Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich has one of those deeply reassuring, soulful voices that resonates particularly strongly in troubled times. Forever Gone is a beautiful record, with Wino’s bruised, bluesy rasp set to a backdrop of acoustic guitars and trippy atmospherics, and acres of sonic space for the doom metal icon’s sombre observations to hang in the air, commanding and comforting in equal measure.

The overtly folky No Wrong stands out as a particularly potent moment of vulnerability, as Wino sides with the angels, insisting that ‘My heart ain’t black and my soul I won’t sell…’ over ageless rolling chords. Taken is stunning, too: a woozy, acid-folk reverie with a bewitching fuzzguitar-cum-violin motif. The record ends with a thunderous but ghostly reading of Joy Division’s Isolation, on which 58-year-old Wino effortlessly channels the morbid angst of a 21-year-old Ian Curtis to scintillating and, again, oddly reassuring effect.

Dom Lawson

X

Alphabetland FAT POSSUM/BANDCAMP

This is a glorious good sound.

This is the sound of lost Los Angeles; of excitement; of wildness; of a deep-rooted passion for biting rockabilly riffs, for life itself. This is beautiful, urgent and, frankly, unlooked for. Alphabetland is the first album in 35 years from the classic line-up of X – Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom, and DJ Bonebrake – but it sure as hell don’t sound like it.

Or rather it does: Doe and Cervenka in fine vocal form, the key lyrical concerns (punk = freedom; freedom = more important than anything) to the fore on and the blistering . Vintage X track is given a decent recording and sounds like… vintage X – fast, furious and no room for prisoners. Cervenka’s downbeat beat poetry on the jazzy (guitar from