'The Big Disappointments'
Hot Cave Records

Booze spilling, rockabilly influenced, smutty dirt rock that reeks of 1980s class. The Big Disappointments are quite the opposite.

These boys and one girl, fashioned out of Boston bands The In Out and Non-Famous, really do like their1980's punk influences. Joining the dots in between the raw barbed wire delivery of Gun Club and the sumptuous melodies of The Replacements, circa Let It Be, they have dispatched an album of bass soaked recordings, echoing fuzzy guitar and post-punk scrawling that all sound like they've been recorded in a tunnel with the pressure of oncoming bullet train.

Take for instance the arse slapping bass juggernaut on Dance Track Budokan that drives lo-fi opposing serrated guitars, and Eric Boomhower's scathing vocal, like a F1 car race around a moonlit M25. Or the high speed electric bread knife riffs and raging solos that set fire during Like To Know. These guys really have studied the book that Jeffery Lee Pierce (Gun Club) never wrote, and a fine book it would have been each page stained with the claret of experience.

This is not the refined sound of a band of young whipper snappy chaps. These boys have graduated from the early learnings of other bands and know exactly the sound they are tracking. If there were to be any complaints to be handed out they would be sent to the office of lack of variety. There are 15 songs here and only two noticeable styles - fast as fuck and slow like Mark E Smith's slurred sentences, but there are a lot worse things that could mount an assault on your hearing for just over 45 minutes.


By: David Samuel

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