Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands – Sixteen Dreams
Dreams? Sixteen hellish nightmares more like (although I suspect that rather facile joke has been made in just about every damn review of this album so far – it’s just too easy too avoid). But yeah, this is rough as fucking balls this is, and fucking awesome with it.
Sixteen songs, under twenty minutes long, this is an album which doesn’t fuck about it just gets on with making a stinking racket, slapping you around the face a bit and then buggering off.
Songs like Barf City might seem a little much in isolation, but oddly enough, in the context of the album itself, surrounded by its slightly less full-frontal neighbours, it actually seems to make sense. Certainly the acoustic strum of Moldy Spectre which follows it seems like a blessedly soothing balm when it arrives.
In some senses this is just a massively lo-fi version of swampy blues rock, with a few stylistic nods to metal thrown in here and there. But it’s just so fucking rough and loud and furious that I find myself really enjoying it, almost as if every time I think they’ve gone as far as they’re going to go down this particular road they nudge it just a little bit further.
The songs are short as hell, and so is the album, and by the end of it I have to confess my head is rattling just a little bit. But it’s fucking ace, this, and if you’re looking for something to blow the alt-folk cobwebs out of your ears for some time to come then this will do the trick with bells on. It’s ludicrous, over the top, and great.
All their albums are released as free downloads, which can be had from their website here.
Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands – Tropical Lover
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Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands – Two Dead Rats
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Short review
‘It scared the goldfish’
It really oughta as well. Glad someone bothered to give it a listen
[...] It reminds me of a slightly less explosive relation of Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands, which I reviewed recently, and growls along really [...]