Jackson Firebird are an Australian hard-rocking duo who crashed onto the scene in 2012 with their debut album Cock Rockin’. Now they are ready to misplace our socks again with their second album Shake the Breakdown (both Napalm Records).
Although the album opener ‘Mohawk Bang!’ seems to lodge this album in the Stoner genre, with its heavy, dirty riffs and slightly distorted vocals over a small range, by the fourth song, ‘High Love’, Jackson Firebird shows their true colours combining the best of both worlds with the cheer and riffs of Rock n’ Roll and the hard crunchiness of Hard Rock in a combination that you can either dance or bang your head to. While it may not have quite the raw swing of, say, Cold Chisel’s ‘Yakuza Girls’, Jackson Firebird throw a whole lot of modern sound into the mix.
Vocally the styles range from stoner, through a lot of Rage against the Machine in songs like ‘Sick n Tired’, to a style I normally associate with bands like The Black Crowes in the verse of ‘Shake the Breakdown’.
The album also contains two splendid covers, the first being a somewhat Stoner version Queen’s ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, the second a really fast paced and swinging cover of ‘The Clapping Song’, originally by Shirley Ellis in 1965. In both cases the songs are arranged and performed in a way that makes it sounds exactly right for this band; adaptations rather than covers.
This is a very strong album where the sound is excellent, the songs are great fun, danceable, and well composed. Australia has a vibrant music scene and bands like Jackson Firebird, and Airbourne before them, prove that the Aussie combination of Rock n’ Roll with something harder is definitely alive and worth spreading.
8.5/10
LORRAINE LYSEN
Started in 2011 and playing Roadburn last April 2013, Blues Pills are now signed with Nuclear Blast and quickly becoming quite the rising star. With the incredibly powerful, husky vocals by Elin Larsson, the blonde Swedish front Fury of the international quartet, incredible soulful guitar lines by the French youngster Dorian Sorriaux (only just 18) and a rocking, swinging base laid down in bass and drums by the two American initiators of the band Zack Anderson and Cory Berry, it’s a trip back to the birth of music festivals in the late 60’s early 70’s. Devil Man (Nuclear Blast) conjures a sense of a jam between Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Cream.
According to legend, or Facebook, Wilson is not an internet band. No, they’re a real band from Detroit. They’re five guys in a van and they’re bringing the party, and their beards, back to your place with their debut album Full Blast Fuckery (Easy Killer/New Damage Records). I keep hearing them get called hard rock but that just doesn’t sit right with me.
The Quill have been doing this a long time; their first album was released in 1995 so if they didn’t have their classic rock cum stoner-lite style down there would be something wrong.