recklessrelations

THE ADJUSTERS - RECKLESS RELATIONS (ZODIAC KILLER RECORDS) - REVIEWED BY DICK PORTER

There’s a lot of sheep dressing up in wolfs’ drags these days. You get it all the time – some bunch of suburban dilettantes cite the Stooges, MC5, or the Dolls as influences and promptly set about shitting out some insipid discharge that bears about as much relation to rock’n’roll as the brown fucking beaver does.

So here’s the Adjusters, citing both the Heartbreakers and Guns N’ Roses. The former, I’ll get to – but unlike Axl and his sidemen, this bunch demonstrate a clear understanding of what constitutes honest, balls-out rock’n’roll. Those of you who haven’t formed your understanding of the genre via MTV will be relieved to know that this quintet (currently down to a foursome having shed a guitarist) bear no resemblance to Hollywood’s idea of ersatz rebellion.

Reckless Relations ploughs a relentless furrow across the same landscape previously tilled by the likes of the Dead Boys, the Damned (Brian James version), the Hollywood Brats, and – fair enough, guv – the Heartbreakers. Somehow, the spirit of the Lower East Side has found its way to Wigan. This may sound implausible – it looks that way, having written it – but that’s the way it is. There is a confidence and swagger here that enables the Adjusters to carry off this unlikely cultural shift.

This confidence is demonstrated right from Reckless Relations’ opening track, ‘Drinkin’ Red Wine’ – a hotpot of Thunders’ licks, Stooges’ joanna and the kind of snotty vocal delivery associated with Stiv Bators. This is ’77 vintage Thunderbird legless, punk rock. Lyrically, like much of the album, it deals with the travails of doomed love (that’s l-u-v, sugah) amid the mythic semen-encrusted glory of skid row rock’n’roll destitution. It’s also the strongest track on the disc, and it takes balls to come in like that.

Happily, the band doesn’t shoot their bolt on the first number. ‘Too Bad’ is a grimy, fuzzed up 12-bar that traces the lineage through Johhny T, all the way back to Chuck Berry. Any song that features the lyric ‘That’s a pretty big scar’ is alright by me. ‘Start Me Up’ (not as I’d imagined a cover of the Stones’ 1981 cut – though that’d have been interesting) could have come straight off Damned Damned Damned – three chords, all vying to arrive at the same moment, chopped and hacked into pleasant, jagged shards to underscore a tale of heartbreak and desire.

The Adjusters apply their influences with vigour – ‘Can’t See’ is an urgent wad of angst and fuzz that storms in with a ‘Johnny B Goode’ intro, while ‘Itch I Can’t Scratch’, sees the tempo dropping just slightly for a bigger, hairier stab at the kind of punk’n’roll that Honest John Plain used to do. For ‘Blackout’, the band momentarily break off from the high-velocity stomping, to pare things down to a bear drumbeat, before taking off for another pass with afterburners firing. The ivories are thrashed rather than tinkled for the breakneck boogie of ‘Kickin’ Down The Doors’, as ‘I Get Paranoid’ mines the rich seam of lyrical angst first opened up on ‘Chatterbox’.

Penultimate track, ‘Misery Addict’ comes in like the Faces on crystal meth, the lyrics inhabiting the same peripatetic ‘Got no car/Got no phone’ that Charlie Harper memorably delineated in ‘I Live In A Car’. The number ends with a gloriously unreconstructed ‘Bitch!’ before a sample from Jailhouse Rock ushers in ‘Let’s Dance’ – a ‘We Are The Road Crew’ for the terminally wasted.

This is a lean album – there’s no acoustic waffle or masturbatory filler. Ten tracks that deliver nothing more than the same spirit that made your forbears want to slash seats. What could be improved? The drums are a little low in the mix (but then, the guitars are cranked up to 11), and if someone could develop a habit, then perhaps we’d get some songs about scoring, too. But these are petty gripes. For once we have been presented with the real thing. Sirrah.

Go see them live:

20th March @ Hamptons (Southampton) w/ The Vibrators + XX-Cortez
30th April @ the 12 bar (Soho, London) w/ The Ten O'Sevens
29th May @ TJ's (Newport, South Wales) w/ The Hip Priests, The Dangerfields + XX-Cortez

MySpace: www.myspace.com/theadjusterspunknroll

Band shot by Mel
Reviewed by Dick Porter 08.02.10

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