Aside from a brief spell in the early 80s when Stray Cats, The Jets and The Polecats managed to break into the UK top forty singles chart, rockabilly has never truly been in fashion. That said, it’s never been out of fashion, either; over the decades, it’s retro and surprisingly enduring style has caught the ears of many, often providing a genuine alternative to the relative mainstream of punk. Rockabilly’s undying spirit has rarely been captured in better form than on The Long Tall Texans’ 2014 release ‘The Devil Made Us Do It‘ – a record that showed how a band three decades into a career could still sound vibrant and how the attitudes of rockabilly had such potential to cross into punk audiences. When done well, rockabilly can be thrilling; when missing the mark, it can sound too predictable to the point of tiredness, but whatever the outcome, the constituent elements are often the same: hefty rattling basslines; walking grooves from the reverbed guitars and a flippant and sometimes edgy voice.
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MORAG TONG – Through Clouded Time EP
Having worked hard at creating meaty and reverbed sludge metal perfection on stages across the south of England and beyond, London’s Morag Tong entered the studio to lay down a few tracks at the tail end of 2015. The resultant EP, ‘Through Clouded Time’, released at the beginning of the new year, presents four numbers of sheer weightiness that not only act as a great snapshot of Morag Tong’s purer musical intents, but also instantly asserts itself as an underground sludge classic.
BLACK OATH – Litanies In The Dark EP
With three full lengths and a handful of EP’s behind them, Italy’s Black Oath have built a cult following since the late noughties, been featured on a Black Sabbath tribute disc and released an underground classic in 2015’s ‘To Below and Beyond’, an album which definitely pushed the band farther up the league table. A hard act to follow, 2016’s ‘Litanies In The Dark’ EP acts as a mere distraction, plugging a gap by featuring four leftovers recorded between 2012-2015. A couple of these tracks are worthy of adding to the Oath canon, others not: as is often the way with leftovers, they are sometimes left over for a reason.
THE NEEDY SONS – Vis-A-Vis
Originally a live project where friends played cover tunes and numbers from their respective catalogues as a way of letting off steam, The Needy Sons is a Boston supergroup of sorts. Mike Gent has recorded several albums with power pop/rock outfit The Figgs, Ed Valuskas has associations with Gravel Pit and the legendary Bill Janovitz has recorded various solo albums as well as being a member of Buffalo Tom (whose ‘Big Red Letter Day’ is one of the finest albums in the history of recorded music). Augmented by Eric Anderson and with their debut album ‘Vis a Vis’ mixed in part by Mike Viola’s matey Ducky Carlisle, you could say this band got off to a good start.
THE DIFFERENCE – EP
Active from the mid to late 80s, The Difference were a progressive rock band that, while indebted to the usual influences from Rush and the big progressive hitters of the era, also tempered their sound with various other more contemporary influences – ranging from 80s pop and AOR to the tight quirks of The Police. On their 1988 EP, the coming together of older prog sounds with an eighties sharpness results in some very pleasing music that, although hampered slightly by budgetary contraints, still presents some great ideas.