First full length by Montreal rockers The Hook Up. Picture perfect garage with punk twists, driven riffs and wailing harmonies. Slow-burn title track “Tomorrow & Today” is a tightly controlled explosion that serves a perfect introduction to the reams of rock that unspool from this album. They boldly plop wah solos in garage tunes and fuck ever so gently with the formula, bringing a harder element to the genre, even going full on desert rock on the Kyuss-ian “Bad Summer” where guitarist/vocalist David Ian Gilbert channels his inner John Garcia with some feral screams. I feel like the album starts to lag a bit after that before resolving into more sludgy territory with “Elevation Time” and sublime banger “Whetherley Mansions”. Bassist/vocalist Jaime Lee Haraldson pins each tune to the mat with hard as nails bass line and lead vocals, the best example of which is the final tune “Today & Tomorrow”, throughout, drummer Josh Peters pounds the skins like a madman, injecting cleverly placed musical asides here and there but mostly nailing down each tune like an iron-clad battle horse. These are pro players who’s offered up rock as pure as it comes, minus the hipster posing that’s rife in the scene of late, and will appeal to urban garage punks and working class AC/DC fans alike.
It’s a great album, though I venture it would be even greater with about 15-20 minutes shaved off the the total playing time, but that’s a very subjective preference for brevity. (To boot, I would love to see this occur on vinyl, but another label would have to step in for that I suppose.) Small details aside, it’s a heavy duty rock n’ roll cyclone of an album, full of piss & vinegar that carries the Cramps, Stooges and MC5 genome with authority.
