Saturday, 1 October 2011

Garage rock: the gift that keeps on giving. Now from The People's Temple

First published in Loud And Quiet


The People's Temple
Sons of Stone 
Out on Hozac

Another month, another Jim Jones-inspired band of psych-pop mop-toppers. Unlike Cults though, The People's Temple have a defiantly macho take on '60s garage rock, more in the vein of The Seeds and the Count Five than The Shangri-Las.

Sons of Stone, the Michigan band's debut, is like opening a dust-covered box of warped 45rpm wax salvaged from Lenny Kaye's garage, a loving recreation of that cherished lo-fi Nuggets sound, complete with simplistic pentatonic riffage, trebly bathroom-echo vocals and drums recorded in a concrete stairwell. Seems like Iggy dropped by to give a production masterclass too, with everything whacked right up into the red for some appallingly distorted guitars that couldn't be more faithful to the era.

While the first third plods along predictably, tunes like 'Starstreamer' and 'Sons of Stone (Revisited)' indulge in some commendably rough-edged proto-punk that any Roky Erickson fan would find easy to love.

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