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Spin Age Blasters-AN INSTANT ATTRACTION EP (tracks being "Baby Cart at the River Styx", "Gates of Flesh"/"Rakes", "[In Your] Daddy's Car") (Fringe World)

I never would have figured Cleveland's Electric Eels to have influenced that many musical aggregations considering their sub-cult status on the underground rock scene, but given how time grows legends a scant few have inevitably popped up on the radar. I'm sure a few of you guys remember Akron's Crummy Fags, this pretty askew bunch from the late eighties led by a Randy Russell who released a number of limited edition cassettes I'm gonna hafta transfer onto solid disque one of these days, and I recall a one-off Electric Eels "tribute" playing in Cleveland that even had former Styrene Jamie Klimek singing mild hosannas. And maybe you would consider the Dead Boys to have an Eels influence after hearing the tales of how Stiv Bators would studiously eyeball Dave E's every stage twist and shudder. Perhaps there are more out there (Matt McManus' Sonars?), but lo and behold yet another bunch claiming an Eels influence has made their presence known, or at least they did a good decade back but considering how slow I am to latch onto such things it might as well have been yesterday. And it was!

Now I know that nineties-era underground records (and the groups that made 'em) really ain't that tops on my hit parade, and writing about 'em is probably just about as foreign to me as wiping your ass might be to some of you less-inclined. That might disqualify me from writing about these Spin Age Blasters in the first place, but mister/sister, this punk trio does have the Eels (anti) aesthetic down pat even though on-purpose low-fidelity and sub-garage recording techniques has been the rigor with many of these releases for quite some time, and given how it's all dead how can I ignore this plea?

Hot "power trio" line up, playing a sonic barrage that owes part to the Eels' mid-seventies rhythm-riff approach and another to early/mid-eighties underground sonic surge. Somehow Seattle's Dehumanizers' classic mid-eighties rantscreed "Kill Lou Guzzo" immediately came to mind, and if you loved that nice piece of punk primacy you'll probably drool buckets over this!

What makes this platter even more of a soo-prize is that these Spin Age Blasters don't hail from the pristine pastures of Northeast Ohio, but the needle-bitten Northwest of Portland, Oregon. True that place was a hotbed of hard rock at one point in time, but that was forty-five years back! Saying that the Portland of the Spin Age Blasters was the same as the one of Paul Revere and the Raiders would be stretching it quite a bit, but at least it's heartening to know that the city is not exactly the hippoid hotbed of depravity that many would want us to think of it as! And yeah, this one ain't exactly a top of the heap winner and nowhere in the same league as the inspiration, but how many true winners have you chanced upon since the early-eighties unless your name is ______________ and you still involuntarily move bowels upon the appearance of any "amerindie" pop slop that hits the ol' PO box!