#0049: The Sonics - Here Are the Sonics [***]

In terms of originality, this is ground breaking stuff and I'd go so far as to say this was the real beginning of punk.  It's brash, rough and thrashes about in your lugholes like an electrocuted octopus.

It is still basically rock and roll though.  The same progressions, the same words and as is irritatingly common for this period, the same actual songs.  Money, for example has appeared on 4 of these albums so far if my count is correct.

The vocal comes in the form of two singers in what I assume is supposed to be unison but who are separated by a quarter tone and 0.0125 of a semi-quaver at every turn.  Punk isn't really my bag and neither is this.  The quality of their voices is not sufficient to be recorded this primitively.

That said, they do some interesting stuff before slouching back into the 12 bar pattern.  Dirty Robber, I liked a lot for example.  Have Love Will Travel, one of the few deviations from the familiar 1-4-5 pattern has a very addictive hook and the distorted guitar and vocal is just the right side of dirty.  The sax that bursts through after the first couple of rounds is a stabbing, spluttering joyride of grungy ecstasy.

It is very much a counter culture album I think.  From the mood and the anti-establishment tone, you can tell these chaps are going for something different and that's great.  I'll come back to a few of these - Psycho I enjoyed and indeed their version of Money benefits greatly from the cheeky little chromatic kink they shove in the first change.  And a song with a title like Strychnine is gonna have to work very hard for me to dislike it.

But those 5 that I really liked don't even make 50% of the content so it's an album to cherry pick, rather than consume whole.