The Hentchmen plays limited rock n roll 50s style scuzzy organ like it used to be with glorious wah-organ, ten watt tube amp cranked up all the way and frenzied drummer with only two drums. It’s the less is more school of thought where you limit yourself so you can get the most from the most glorious rhythm and noise formula ever invented.

It makes you think, hearing this, how music needn’t be the way it is now where bands only exist to make studio records. This record like all of theirs is recorded cheaply live at shows and in some guy’s basement and with just the most basic gear. The first time you hear it you think ‘shit man these guys have just plugged a microphone into the desk and played a show’ as if they had insulted the whole process of studio recording. In actual fact the primitive rawness of their sound gives you a sense of the excitement of live music like no amount of hi-tech sound engineering could match. It makes you want to get out and see it in its live context the way music only ever used to exist – when it actually formed a social function instead of the numb and solitary computer-based pastime it is now.

I can imagine folks complaining about the lo-fi nature of this record but maybe those people have been stuck in their bedrooms too long and jaded by over complicated hi-fi studio records that no one wants to see live cause it’s impossible to recreate the thing the same.

The songs are all pretty much the same fun sounding lightweight stuff about cars and girl and ‘having a real good time’ just like Mitch Ryder and the Wheels and all the Nuggets bands on the first couple of tracks of their studio albums before they all got too serious and started making the schmaltzy Paul McCartney shite. The difference is that the Hentchmen keep it up for two sides of the record (and for their career). These guys are historians too - their cover of the Kinks’s rare b-side ‘Never met a girl like you before’ is the Kinks stripped bare of their polite English sensibilities and morphed into wild mountain call from the wild.

I am sure some people will think it’s some kind of throwback novelty pisstake that shouln’t be taken seriously and I hated Kitsch as much as anyone but I think that the Hentchmen are sincere. They limit themselves to focus themselves on getting a bit more out of the old formula when everyone else has given up or become so obsessed with reinventing or innovating that they have forgotten the whole point of rock and roll and its holy twin talismen - rhythm and noise.

http://www.hentchmen.com

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