Most Popular
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Fighting Fire With Fire Does an unproven treatment that combats drug addiction with drugs promise more than it can deliver?
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The Ozz-Man Cometh After years of touring the nation, Ozzfest 2008 finds a home in Dallas' suburbs
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César Chávez, Texas Forget about renaming Industrial Boulevard or Ross Avenue or the Dallas North Tollway. The city should go all the way.
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Eat My Dirt A builder's guide to skirting the zoning laws and making the city look goofy
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Low-Bid to No-Bid Don't have a clue how DART could bust its budget by a billion bucks? Here's one.
Blogs
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Fri Sep 5, 4:55 PM
A Man Rolls Into a 7-Eleven With a Baseball Bat and Pocket Knife ...
Fri Sep 5, 4:03 PM
Last Night: Mudhoney At The Granada Theater
Sat Sep 6, 12:23 PM
Good Friday: New Science Projects, Zeuss/House Harkonnen, THe BAcksliders, VEGA?, Squeeze, Sean Kirkpatrick, Kate Voegele, Bear Colony, Beard-a-Fit 2
Fri Sep 5, 5:30 PM
Weekend Planner: Get Our Yer Rotten Fruit
Fri Sep 5, 2:30 PM
This Just In: Dallas’ Need for Cialis to Plunge Next Month
Fri Sep 5, 12:00 PM
National Features >
SF Weekly
Identity Plagiarism
A blogger steals someone else's life story and calls it her own.
By Ashley Harrell
Westword
Fuel's Gold
How William Orr's quest for better, cheaper gas became a crime.
By Alan Prendergast
Miami New Times
Mold Over Miami
The family of a dead judge blames a creeping fungus in the federal courthouse.
By Tim Elfrink
The Pitch
McCain Girl
I worked at Kmart with John McCain's director of strategy.
By Alan Scherstuhl
The Lash Outs
The Lash Outs (Zodiac Killer)
By Jesse Hughey
Published on May 08, 2008
From sneering vocals straight off Never Mind the Bollocks to the amped-up 12-bar blues progressions lifted from old Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent 45s, everything about The Lash Outs' debut album screams throwback. It would feel like a grave-digging rip-off if they didn't attack the songs with so much enthusiasm.
The disc opens with the breakneck instrumental "Chupacabra," which was a smart choice. Because, by the time Joey Holbrook' s occasionally grating nasal singing surfaces on the second song, "Set Me Back"—an uncharacteristically dull mid-tempo cokehead lament, the album's only misstep—you're already hooked. It picks up again at track three, "Dream Catcher," with red-hot retro rock lead guitar, handclaps and lines like "How many Jell-O shots does it take/For you to give a guy like me a break?" That kind of witty update on the age-old subject of the unattainable girl, one of pop music's oldest subjects, is what they do best.
Along with chicks and self-pity, another recurring subject is the sad state of rock. They gripe about empty clubs and unresponsive crowds in Deep Ellum on "The Kids Don't Wanna Dance" (hear it) and brashly close the album by calling out poseurs in skin-tight jeans and Clear Channel radio listeners with "Requiem for Rock and Roll." They may be right when they sing, "Heartbreak, love-make, tears and beers/We sing the same tired song for 50-something years." But if more bands put out albums this lively, there'd be no need to call the mortician.
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