If it’s rip-roaring rock n’roll from Barnsley you’re after, then look no further than RBA, the town’s finest export since Saxon graced the airwaves!
Seriously, they’ve kicked up a fine old sound, easily capable of flooring me within seconds of it hitting my ears. Catapulted into public consciousness by their awesome self-recorded/released debut long-player ‘As Nature Intended’, RAISED BY ANIMALS have followed up with this champagne celebration EP. Consisting of five songs from a sparkling new crop, for me this serves as absolute proof that they are bona fide top-draw rock n’rollers.
Hanging out on a South Yorkshire limb, the group walk in the footsteps of Rod Stewart and Phil Lynott whilst echoing the more recent, yet unfulfilled potential of forgotten heroes like 5:30. For those yet to hear this mind-blowing outfit in action, I urge you to listen to this release.
From the Thin Lizzy-esque openings of ‘Love In Me’, the funk echoing stomp grips you by the lugholes and waltzes you through your own consciousness, with a nod to the RnB roots of the 6T’s. As the powerful drum-rolling music-hall reverb kicks in, so does the realisation that this is key changing through you on its way to your heart.
Oh my God, this is music to the ears alright! The follow-up is a controlled encapsulation of chunky chord changes and delicate shifts in tempo that celebrates life like a peace protest or the perfect love. Set off like an impossible skewered jam, the story is one of your own making as this shining testament to the power of rock n roll seems to thunder on as it trails off. Ether? They’re spot on.
It could be the twelve-string acoustic that double-rattles through the mix of the next lurching tale of abandonment that gives it its charm, or it could be the decadent tone that urges you to tell your boss to shove his job up his arse and head for the equator. Whatever it is, ‘Tickled Pink’ seems to strike every chord available. Above all else, it’s a straightforward rejection of the ever-more conservative values that blight this society like a festering plague, and my heart is well and truly captured as my head is flooded with a hundred and one reminders why I do all I can in order to resist conforming
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Hints of cyberspace are seemingly home-grown and homespun during the blistering finale ‘Favourite Friend’, and the devil’s own truths slice through this exaggerated tale of internet self-deception as it staggers under its own harmonic weight.
Deception? At times, this marvellous record is laughably, deliciously, deceptively simplistic. But it kicks the shit out of pretty much everything else that’s currently being touted as rock n’roll in the North, and that’s a fact.
With mantra-like choruses and a backdraught of shameless optimism to fan the flames, this is a total reignition of rock’s halcyon days, where period attention to detail recaptures the era in all of its blasphemous flaming glory.
RAISED BY ANIMALS sleaze it out rather than rip it up, but the heat still causes their second release to catch fire rather than simply melt. Whether it’s the tap-room soul in singer Paul’s vocals that howl with age-defying gravity in reverse, the ompnipresent power of observation at work(a blessed gift that hasn’t been wasted on these lads), those stomping great deep-down dirty riffs or any amount of bass thunder you care to mention, this is almost certain to hit you smack-bang in the SOULar plexus.
I doubt that this brilliant effort will be bettered by anything else in the same strain released this year.
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