Electric Children’s 2022 single ‘Triste Journee’ was an interesting recording. It featured prominent garage rock guitars, punchy keyboards that drew as much influence from novelty horror rock as much as 60s fare from the likes of Question Mark and The Mysterians, and topped that with a muli-lingual lyric that further escalated their slightly trashy vibe. It was certainly nothing like you’d expect from an act being promoted with the stoner rock/desert rock label. Their 2024 single ‘Scene of The Crime’ gave more of a stoner link due to a guesting Nick Oliveri, and although the recording was driven by fuzzy riffs with the tone of Queens of The Stone Age in a particularly punchy mood, the end result, again, owed a little more to garage rock. Shouting gang vocals and a massive drum sound invited stronger comparisons with a ‘Tomorrow Hit Today’ era Mudhoney, but labels aside, it was a huge step forward and an indicator of potentially great things ahead from this band.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
THE DRY RETCH – Straight Outta Cuba!
It’s rather common for musical artists to lighten up as the years pass, but this is to be expected with age. It’s often impossible to cling onto the anger of youth. Just ask Paul Weller or James Dean Bradfield. Even Henry Rollins sounded like a pale imitation of himself on the Rollins Band’s disappointingly lightweight swansong ‘Nice’ in 2001. There are notable exceptions, of course: the first couple of OFF! albums showcase a punk “retirement age” Keith Morris with as much fire as he had in his Black Flag days, and Slayer’s ‘Repentless’ from 2015 attacks a huge amount of energy and absolute fury, resulting in their best work for a quarter of a century. It could even rank within their top five best albums ever.
Over twenty years on from the release of their ‘Columbus Was Wrong…’ album, The Dry Retch prove to be another exception to the idea that getting older means a retreat to a safe space. ‘Straight Outta Cuba!’, released in October 2024, captures the Liverpool-based noise-makers in a savage mood, and rightly so, considering the state of the entire world at the time of its recording.
CHIMPAN A – Here Comes The Flood / Wolves
Chimpan A’s ‘The Empathy Machine’ was an interesting album. Its songs took on the kind of lengths that would normally be associated with prog rock, but its sounds were far more pop oriented. The best tracks blended layers of synth with perfectly pitched melodic vocals, straddling the musical gulf between pop, AOR and electronica, almost in a way that pre-empted Alex Lifeson’s commercial sounds on the Envy of None debut, released just a few years later.
WITCHCRAFT – IDAG
Five years on from their lockdown release, ‘Black Metal’, which saw Witchcraft trading in their trademark stoner riffs for a bleak, stripped down occult folk sound, and almost a decade after the release of the brilliant ‘Nucleus’, the Swedes play things fairly safely on their 2025 long player ‘IDAG’. In this case, though, the feeling of safety has its own strength: founding member Magnus Pelande sounds more comfortable than ever working within a classic doomy metal format, and for the band’s fans, this return to a more “classic” Witchcraft sound will certainly present a welcome move, even if in some ways it feels like a step backwards.
THE CHELSEA CURVE – Jamie C’mon (Andy Lewis Remix) / Hey Sah-Lo-Ney
Across a series of digital singles in 2021, Boston’s The Chelsea Curve delivered a bunch of top notch tunes. At their best, the tracks sounded like unreleased gems by the likes of Pearl Harbor & The Explosions and Holly & The Italians put through a mod-ish filter, such was the band’s knack for hitting the listener with a world of classic riffs and big, very retro hooks.