Classis Rock Magazine
Track Of The Day: Underride
terrybezer / Features / 03/03/2009 12:31pm
Today’s free track by Underride, handpicked by Sleazegrinder. Click here for previous Track Of The Day’s.Seattle is still as rambunctiously rock-heavy as it ever was, only these days, the scene is not so intertwined with one specific sound/drug like it was in the early 80s, when grunge first lurched up from the goop to bum out an entire generation of hip young things. The last real cohesive ‘movement’ that town had was the retro pogo-punk craze of early 00s, as exemplified by The Briefs (now Cute Lepers) and, unm… well, there were a couple others, too. It wasn’t a huge movement. Take a dip in Seattle’s rugged nightlife these days and you’ll find a fistful of noise-powered spazz-cases like These Arms Are Snakes, bludgeon-metal uber-dudes like Lesbian, and several thousand alcoholic garage rock bands with “The” names. What you won't find a lot of, unless you’re skulking around the Sub Pop retirement home, maybe, are many bands mining the sound that made Seattle the Coolest City In The World for a good five or years way-back-when.
And then there’s Underride. Lately, they’ve been calling themselves the “Kings of Camaro Rock”, which is fine with me. It sorta gives you an idea of what you’re in for. Camaro drivers are generally drop-outs with drug problems, and that sort of character usually digs Big Rock – Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC - and you get plenty of that from these fuckers. And since they’re from Seattle, they also bring a sheet of black rain with ‘em, that same sort of ‘weird scene’ vibe you’d get from Alice In Chains and Gruntruck, with a bonus splattering of Tad’s psycho-psychedelia drizzled on top.
Underride’s been around since ’02, at least. They have never been a flavor of the month back home, and they probably never will be. They don’t do irony, which is generally how you get famous these days. They just rock with wild abandon, and they do it constantly. One of the things I like about ‘em is that they’re versatile. You can take them anywhere. They’ve opened for the hippest of the hip, like Rollins’ backing band, the Thin Lizzy-esque hair-shakers Mother Superior, and the not-so-hip-at-all (i.e. Dokken) with the same results: blood, sweat, beers, and healthy t-shirt sales. Plus, they write about stuff we can all relate to, especially if you drive a Camaro: hookers, drugs, getting beat up by cops.
Not that it matters (clearly), but I’ve been extolling the virtues of Underride’s super-grunge since ’03 debut album, Horsepower Kills, and every year since, it’s seemed like they were just on the verge of breaking through in a big way. Well, this year’s no fuckin’ different than the last six. Underride has a spanking new album called One of Us, and it’s a monster. In fact, it’s so overwhelming that is’ impossible to do anything else while it’s on. Driving? You’ll sail right into a brick wall. Cooking dinner? You’ll burn the house down. Sex? It’ll somehow turn into murder. It’s been awhile since a rock album really commands your attention, but One of Us does. Not only is it loud, bruising, and heavy, its got honest-to-gawd songs, with hooks and choruses and all that good shit.
Enough of my jibber-jabbber. Proof’s in the pudding. Here’s My Little Hell, from the new one. Download, rock out, repeat as necessary.
Sleazegrinder