The laughingly brilliant Bazooka Jones album that stuns the senses and twists the fingernails with it's audacious abundance of vocal supremity and exceptionally tight rock n roll musicianship is truly something to behold!
I had no idea music this good actually existed outside of the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame which no longer impresses me as long as Bazooka Jones remain unfeatured, unplaqued, and unawarded for their significant accomplishment in composition, performance and production... it's a band to crave for at a time when such major audio cravings have become the stuff of legend!
The album quite simply blows you away and I'm here to elucidate..
Pants off is a song that's dangerously close to being too utterly fantastic for words with it's Shirley Manson style vocals from the delightful Viagra and some rather swirlingly cool guitar work courtesy of Bullethead. You get all the usual icing too... smart bass and drum work but the spectacularment is in the arrangement... dead cool! Then of course there's some rather nice early Blondie/Debbie Harry reminiscences in Your baby (she wants me) complete with the Bazooka styled tongue-up-the-skirt lyrics you're going to expect from here-on-in!
Another fine piece of work is delivered courtesy of Love up which is quite commendable for the excellent vocals and for the faithfulness to the 'go-go-ish' era arrangement and then with Swinging on the moon.. you get neck tingles as Viagra's vocals sooth and swoon at a nice casual pace alongside the guitar and bass work. The lyrics are truly brilliant.. and you don't have to be that attentive to agree entirely!
Goodbye Mr Niceguy has you wishing you weren't reviewing one CD but a whole Bazooka Jones collection cos it's at this point that you realize you're half the way through this magnificent CD and that's not good! Watch out for the superb guitar bits and the equally superb harmonies over the top of Ms V's mouth sounds!
These boots are made for walking is of course the one you're thinking of but not the one you're gonna get... BZ's arrangement is actually quite superior to most versions I've heard to date and what it is that makes that challenging statement true is the spectacular tightness and meanderings of the guitars, drums, and sock splitting vocals! It's a cool version guys... you know it.. we know it too!
Bazooka ride has the stamp of wonderment all over it! A brilliantly inventive way of displaying just about every smart thought in the form of lyrics that keep you in awe. Then there's that amazing 2.15 bit with many a hat off to the producer (Geoff Michael) for his wonder work at the desk thingyo. Again, Viagra handles the mouth bits with ease and again the arrangement is very very superb!
Girl on fire is the track that Elley Wilson introduced me to before I got to hear the rest of the CD and the one that made me go 'Ohhhhh yeeesssssss!' The black and white videos coloured in years later come to mind when I imagine this one being performed on the telly... very true to form, very true to Bazooka Jones. Life of the party and it's successor Drive-in boy meanwhile, are two classic examples of very fine songwriting and musicianship in a world that's been losing classic songwriting and musicianship at about the same hourly rate as the life-protecting ice sheets! Then.. for added enthrallment we have the fantastic Perfect one - an amalgamation of the best of the sixties and the seventies and today. Watch out for Viagra's dynamic and enthralling vocal work... dead nice!
The last track on this brilliant collection of ear and thought and humour candy is Babyfoolaround which really should be out there at the top of the 'othercharts'. It's not just the innovation that makes Bazooka Jones so stunningly mesmerizing... it's the fact that they managed to produce such an excellent album inspired by earlier eras that fits beautifully into this era that blows you away.. and Bazooka Jones do it with ease!
