lantern

And we return to Cardinal Fuzz our new favourite imprint don’t you know. We were tempted to put this on a back burner for the next missive but the blighters been buzz sawing us into oblivion and to be honest we needed to scratch its itchy spot. Lantern hail from Philadelphia and come primed with the kind of swagger toned primitive lo-fi fuzz blues you imagine jumping straight out of the pages of ugly things or some psych garage grooved tome committed to print by Vernon Joynson. ‘rock n’ roll Rorschach’ just blisters with the kind of potency sadly rarely heard around these parts these days, obviously the handiwork of dudes huddled together tuned into those ear candy platter playing garage punk pod casts and packing sounds spiked with enough feral cool and rawness as to lift your wig clearly off your head. Released as a strictly limited issue of just 500 copies all housed in reverse board sleeves replete with inserts and a CD that includes four additional cuts not featured on the vinyl version, ‘Rock n’ Roll Rorschach’ is a boogie baiting trawl through rock’s finest moments blending lo-fi monochrome glam, trash and scuzzy blues into a blistered brew that’s sure to melt your stylus and along picking up a who‘s who reference guide that name checks the likes of the Dead Boys (’rock n‘ roll Rorschach‘ being the case in point albeit hit with a heavy dose of the black halos and the makers along with the pulse racing friction of ‘out of our heads‘ as it imagines Bators in a scorched face down with the Saints), Johnny Thunders and the Cramps – the latter being best served by the thunderous bearing down fast psycho-billy head charge that is the head scalping ‘where are we now‘. From the minute ‘evil eye’ cranks into life the blue touch paper is lit and with that enters a smoking lip curled glam grooved hip shimmying babe sassily mooching to a frazzled shakedown to which ‘king of the jungle’ picks up the baton bringing in its wake a fuzzed out beaten around the edges trashed out T-Rex psyche. Vying for the sets best moment the hollowing parch dry ‘she’s a rebel’ is sparsely spiked in a spectral chic that opines to a velveteen bliss kissing and finds itself upstaged at the last gasp by the snake winding ju ju that is ‘the conjurer’ whose shit faced and cool garage blues purr tunes into the dark heart of a Jones in situ Stones replete with howling harmonicas which goes without saying always seals the deal for us. ’heart in your tongue’ wraps up the set in a storm the barriers parting surge lush in a maddening meltdown side serving of a squealing brass section pitting their wits against a scalped strut riffage. As to the four additional cuts the rash forming ’mr mars’ reveals the collectives penchant for 50’s bubble grooved pop while ’rock n’ roll music’ is just as it says on the tin nodding along the way to the late great Ronnie Dawson which leaves the Dale-esque cowpunk rumble ‘I don’t know’ to howl with such scuffed up vintage craft that you’d swear it’d been rescued from a mid 60’s studio vault. The dogs danders in short. http://www.cardinalfuzz.bigcartel.com