Sewer rats are, it’s fair to say, the sort of bastard-son-of-Lemmy / Kyuss-worshipping hybrid that comes along every once in a blue moon to shake the underground out of its complacency. There’s a raucous energy about the band that sees the music leaping from the speakers with a vitality that is becoming increasingly rare and you can imagine from the moment that opening track ‘skint’ detonates like a high-explosive round that the band’s live performances will often feature at least as much blood as sweat and that the band themselves were born at the end of a whiskey bottle.
As a statement of intent, opening your EP with a track like ‘skint’ is a strong one. A brutal, surging, stoner anthem that sounds as if it was recorded in a damp, graffiti-strewn rehearsal room as amps burned and fizzed in the corner, it’s a searing, malevolent example of the genre and the relentless noise belies the fact that the band is, in fact, a three-piece. It’s stoner, Jim, but not as we know it, the band infusing their music with a punk attitude that owes much to Lemmy and his troops of doom in Motorhead. Aptly named, ‘devil blues’ is a syrupy number that sees the band blazing away on their instruments with fire in their eyes and liquor on their tongues. Brutal, with more than a hint of High On Fire’s crushing groove, ‘Devil blues’ is a moonshine fuelled beast that refuses to let up. ‘Black label serotonin’ slows the pace and delves into the world of vintage psychedelia for a head-trip that sees the band exploring slow rhythms and lysergic soloing to grand effect. The EP’s title track sees the band in full-on, heads down, hard-riffing mode, shattering the briefly peaceful mood of the previous song and sending the listener staggering, pumped full of Benzedrine out into the moonlight as the riffs pile up into huge, arcing balls of primal fire before ‘so far away’ rounds out the EP. With hard-hitting percussion and the sort of riff that permeated Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’ filtered through The Transplants and early QOTSA, ‘so far away’ leaves the listener with a raging contact high and a need to shower vigorously and there is no doubt that Sewer Rats are a primal force that cannot be ignored.
Neither big nor clever, the Sewer Rats are aptly named. The bottom of the heap, the rejected, the spurned, they have the characteristics of their name sake – Violent, unpredictable and showered in filth they lurk in the shadows of the underground, occasionally pouncing on the unwary with their brutal anthems of rebellion. It’s awesome music – rock music for the terminally afflicted, created by musicians with a passion for the unhinged. It is hugely enjoyable, and whilst its appeal may well be niche, for those who dig the underground scene, Sewer Rats are a throwback to the glory days when labels such as K and sub pop ruled the airwaves (venerable labels to which you can now add Fluffer who released this beast). This is rock at its most primal and it’s easy to imagine that anyone who ever bought a copy of ‘raw power’ and loved it will find this essential and I can think of no higher praise.
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