The album’s snarling, sexy attack is a lean, mean mélange of gritty 70s punk, aggressive garage rock and wide-eyed sleaze.

It’s inevitable that the ASYLUM STREET SPANKERS’ unclassifiable mixture of blues, vaudeville, jazz, C&W, cabaret, comedy, rock, etc. would hit the (off-)Broadway stage.

Catnip Dynamite is the greatly anticipated follow-up to the debut, and those who loved the first record will be pleased to know that there’s not a trace of sophomore slump here.

Producer CHRIS ROBINSON gives the duo a back porch/living room atmosphere, as if you’ve stumbled onto a couple of old buddies running through songs they used to play together, as well as showing off new ones.

Austin, Texas is known for its roots rock scene, but it also has, thanks to the great ROKY ERICKSON, a rich psychedelic rock tradition.

Cocksure swagger cuddles with bruised romantic yearning as Klasson unselfconsciously adopts the rock & roll myth.

Here’s a second round of reviews posted here and nowhere else! In case you missed my post from a week ago, we had a nice backlog of several dozen reviews that there was not room for in the current issue 63, or we received the albums right as we were going to press. So again, I thought, let’s put them here for you for now so that you can still read them—and to give those of you who have not seen one of our issues before a taste of what we have been doing in our pages these last 29 years (wow, that’s a long time, isn’t it?). As promised last week, I will try to post them all, a dozen at a time, in this space. So keep checking back every few days and you will find more!

While the EP is only two songs long, there is enough seduction and redemption for an entire record.

Tonight (Friday 1/30, 6:30) Shiraishi will be at Japan Society, reading with Itaru and participating in a discussion moderated by Forrest Gander. Saturday afternoon at 2 she will be at the Bowery Poetry Club, again with Itaru, who is quite a wonderful and imaginative player; also reading will be Beat legend Ira Cohen, health permitting, and Steve Dalachinsky, who will furthermore pitch in with Shiraishi on the English/Japanese tandem parts. I will be there.

The Damned have released their first album in seven years and thankfully the wait was well worth it.

Another year, another fine show from Neil Young’s archives. This one is compiled from two solo acoustic shows on consecutive nights in Ann Arbor, before his solo debut had been released.

Nobody else has reimagined the basics of rock so drastically or so well in a long time.

David Eugene Edwards’ latest effort under the Woven Hand banner is more fearsome and relentless than anything he’s previously done.

I don’t often wish I were in Los Angeles, but if I could be there November 7-8 at the Hollywood Bowl, I would, because forty years after its November 1968 release, Van Morrison will be performing his album Astral Weeks with two of the musicians he recorded it with.

It’s Anderson’s Astral Weeks, not in sound but feeling, in the internal journey of it and the transcendence it reaches for.

October 1973 (35 years ago) marked ABC’s last-ditch attempt to garner a hit for this album: They released the single “My Old School,” backed by “Pearl of the Quarter.” It didn’t work.

Metronome The City is a rare find: a band able to maintain a unified sound whilst jumping between disparate genres and tempos without missing a beat.

Blixa Bargeld and the rest of Neubauten compile a large handful of previously web-only tracks into a electronic/percussive stew.

Fasteau will be playing this Tuesday, October 14 at 10 PM at Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC with Clif Jackson (bass), Ron McBee (percussion, berimbau), and guests. This is part of the monthly ESP-Disk series at BPC.

Dickinson flirts with melodrama but unlike Wile E. Coyote, who invariably chases the Road Runner only to fall off a cliff, Dickinson is more a like an experienced horse that gallops near the periphery of a jagged cliff yet knows enough to not fall off.

For male vocalists in pop music, it’s the tenors who get all the glory, but in jazz and much soul it’s the baritones, and when I saw this San Francisco-based veteran compared to JOE WILLIAMS and LOU RAWLS, I was eager to check him out.

All of this supporting/surrounding lyrics of desolate debauchery, anomie, and despair, as though trying to turn “Holocaust” into party music.

Somber and seductive, brooding and atmospheric, Tamaryn’s debut EP is filled with the kind of shimmering songs that alto chanteuses like Nico and Siouxsie Sioux offered us in years past.

Steven Stapleton will cure you, and the method involves mutated jazz beats and a petrol-sodden rag.

Using a combination of the original session tapes, demos, and newly recorded parts, near the end of last year the band put out a version conforming to their own sound rather than their producers’. Three decades on, the classic underneath the bad production has been revealed, proving that the excitement they generated in their home base of Los Angeles was not mere hype.

With a little searching and a lot of luck, I found some bands on MySpace that not only fixed my metal jones, but also allow their songs to be downloaded.

The set focuses on analogue electronic music with the requirement that it be synthetic yet organic and created through a symbiotic relationship between man and machine.

Doc on the Roq’s recordings of Francis E. Dec’s paranoid schizophrenic rantings prove to be fascinating listening, while the Jonestown Death Tape frightens me back into reality.

With the recent 2-CD reissue of Forever Changes the album continues to astound four decades on.

Black Metal has possessed my soul like a demon, so, out of curiosity, I did a search for black metal on Newgrounds and actually found some projects worth mentioning.

Part of a trilogy, this is darkwave ambient music, quiet but with serrated edges on its drones. There’s nothing new agey about this ambient, which makes for uneasy listening with its buzzing and clanking amid the drones and a glacial pace of movement that oozes foreboding.

Fern Knight is entrancing Renaissance fare with a psych-rock twist.

Yeah, the chiming guitars and chord progression of “Graveyard Girl” keep threatening to turn into “Money Changes Everything,” but that fits well with the ‘80s love on display throughout – usually much more synthpop, of course.

My neurotic downloading compulsion began with electronic music, so in the interests of linear chronology, it is only fitting that I begin with the artists that led me down this path of chronic gigabyte consumption.

In a sense Lucky is an album of love songs. But refreshingly these are love songs that aren’t narrow in scope and don’t rely on clichés.

Philly-based ensemble provide a live score to a singular film.

LARRY KIRWAN, the leader of Black 47, is no Toby Keith – he’s his diametrical opposite on the political spectrum – so this is no rah-rah “support our troops” tripe.

For the past week, I’ve been listening to this record almost obsessively, so I feel compelled to give it the full review treatment.

Hebb’s soft voice is as warm and charming as it was on “Sunny” back in ‘66, and the tasteful arrangements are smoothly authentic.

After listening to their great Escape from Dragon House practically every day for most of last summer, I wasn’t sure whether a new album could captivate as strongly, but after two plays this had its hooks in me.

The sound wasn’t the greatest, but playing in divey places fits their brand of scuzzy, lo-fi noise rock.

I would like to welcome my son Jim into the world, born 23 days ago. I’m hoping his progress will be quick enough so that he will be able to compose all my reviews and do all my interviews for me in time for the spring issue 62. A couple of you were kind enough to write and congratulate me after seeing little James Burton make the coveted #1 spot in Steve Holtje’s Top 10 on this site last week (see, he’s already overachieving), and thanks to Steve-o for that honor as well. Who wants photos? / Who wants old Springhouse videos, on MySpace? / Here’s five more reviews of old stuff I ran out of time to review that should have been in the last issue!

The Dolls failed to take advantage of their brief momentum by dulling the temperament of the crowd with what seemed like an endless amount of songs from their last album.

The fact that their evolution over three albums and various EPs has avoided repetition will be mourned by some who want only the familiar, but refreshingly enables them from becoming outdated.

With the staccato surge and somber vocalizing of DAF, the distorted synthetic soundscapes of Dirk Ivens’ eeriest work, and the industrial strength of The Young Gods, Martial Canterel’s Refuge Underneath is a bleak intellectual exercise in the dark and danceable.

The Truckers have long specialized in gritty portrayals of the New South’s sordid sides. A few titles such as “Daddy Needs a Drink,” “You and Your Crystal Meth,” and “A Ghost to Most” give an idea of the dirty soap operas that play out across this epic album, but the black humor – usually paired with a profound empathy – runs deep through most of the 19 songs.

These go to eleven – Nigel Tufnel becomes a doctor

There’s a wild streak within – clear-headed musicianship, but also many surprises, all coordinated gracefully by a maestro who into his sixties is making music that’s as visionary as ever.

The delicacy of her music in this period is of a piece with her famous 1970 LP, and her voice is even more angelic.