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Foot stomping riffs, massive guitar solos and a truly relentless tempo give the record punch and passion. They live for rock, booze, women and cars, with opener ‘Ready To Rock’ setting the tone. Imbued with that true gang mentality that makes their influences so exhilarating, they’re the real deal.

If you’re curious as to who will keep Aussie rock alive and kicking once AC/DC and Rose Tattoo are gone then Airbourne are the answer.

But the title track is the killer tune and truly shows the quality of the band – hook-laden and instantly addictive, it is reminiscent of the very best of the band’s influences and more.Īussie hard rockers kick out the jams on album three. Album opener ‘Kiss Me Girl’ is music’s answer to a line of coke – you’re sucker-punched within seconds. I Want The World delivers vitriol and addictive sounds in equal measure. Lauren Tate is a girl who has a lot to get off her chest and her cathartic release appears to be cooking up a true shitstorm in certain areas of music business who are naming Hands Off Gretel as a band to watch. Mental health, body image, loneliness – the topics covered aren’t for anyone having a bad day. Inspired by the likes of Hole, The Distillers and Nirvana, this is acidic grunge-pop laced with South Yorkshire grit. But now there’s a new force of nature to be the voice of misfits, miscreants and nursery rhyme nightmares. It was left to the likes of Saxon, Def Leppard and the Human League to provide the homegrown musical backdrop to the years of decline. But it probably doesn’t matter one jot to Hands Off Gretel frontwoman Lauren Tate – she wasn’t even born. Even its left leaning governments of the 1980s – which helped gain the whole area the moniker ‘The Peoples’ Republic of South Yorkshire’ – couldn’t stop Margaret Thatcher waving her malevolent wand and decimating the region’s coal industry. South Yorkshire has long been a plucky region. Riot grrrl on the loose in South Yorkshire ‘That level of unrelenting heat and incandescence is simply not survivable’, Henry Rollins points out in the excellent booklet included here ‘I wouldn’t wish it an anyone’.

Pastoral Hide And Seek is a similarly overlooked marvel, the ‘lost’ title track of that year’s album, and the final single Cry To Me – originally a strictly limited pressing – saw Pierce chase his muse further into virtuoso blues guitar territory.įor the evolution that Jeffrey’s music underwent over the years, the demons that drove him remained a constant the downside of course was thwarted career success, failing health and an early demise in 1996. Jeffrey’s literate musicality ensured that he’d never stay confined to any garage punk alcove for long during this period of the eighties, Pierce would come into his own as a distinctively poetic songwriter and a prodigious lead guitar player both qualities are evident in 1990’s The Great Divide, which showcases his honey-dripping fingerwork – an inspired collision of Carlos Santana and Tom Verlaine – rather admirably.

A CORPSE WIRED FOR SOUND REFERENCE FULL

The second album’s Fire Of Love saw Pierce fling gasoline over the Jody Reynolds classic, before driving the feedback-drenched bad vibes full into the red with 1983’s Stooge-like Death Party.Īt this point, however, the history becomes disrupted 1984’s Las Vegas Story album never yielded a single release, 1985 saw Jeffrey operating as a solo artiste, and 1988’s Breaking Hands single from a reconstituted Gun Club line up isn’t, for whatever reason, included here (though we’re compensated with a bonus single of Miami demo cuts). The one-two punch of Sex Beat / Ghost On The Highway for the 1981 debut single is naturally held up as the band’s defining statement, but The Gun Club’s subsequent works – even given the impermanence of their line-ups over the years – proved this to be no flash-in-the-pan. The long out-of-print 7 inchers lovingly reproduced here provide a broad – if incomplete – timeline of Jeffrey’s decade-plus musical arc. The resultant splice of anarchic electrical energy and bad-omen voodoo vibes was compelling, troubling, and quite unique it almost goes without saying that Pierce received scant recognition for his efforts over much of the course of a depressingly short lifetime.

A CORPSE WIRED FOR SOUND REFERENCE PLUS

Plush box set of Gun Club 7 inchers, plus extras.Ī near-visionary musical alchemist in his time, Jeffrey Lee Pierce emerged from the seething creative stew of early eighties LA punk, a hollerin’ bleach-blonde street corner shaman on a mission to mainline the darker essence of America’s traditional musical forms – most specifically the blues – into the virginal veins of punk rock.

A corpse wired for sound reference