Fricke’s Picks: A Better BangThe first American full-length album by the Norwegian trio BigBang, From Acid to Zen (Oglio/Grand Sport), is a mixed bag of then and now: seven tracks pulled from the group’s most recent Norwegian releases, 2005’s Poetic Terrorism and 2007’s Too Much Yang, both Number One albums there, plus recut versions of two older numbers and two new songs. It’s a shotgun buffet, like those early U.S. LPs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones that combined album tracks and singles from unrelated sessions, and it succeeds the same way: like an instant greatest-hits record. Singer-guitarist-songwriter Øystein Greni has the right history in his genes — his dad sang in a Norwegian band that opened for Led Zeppelin in 1968 — and he grounds songs like “Early December,” “Hurricane Boy” and the brilliantly titled “From Acid to Zen” in the eternal power-chord charge and fish-hook riffs of the Stones and the Who. But Greni also has a knack for wringing fresh excitement from the familiar: the country-angel harmonies and ice-Byrds guitar in the new version of “Wild Bird,” the improbable dream of Badfinger and Hüsker Dü in “The One.” For Greni, who co-produced the new tracks with Phil Nicolo, From Acid to Zen is a big step in a bigger gamble. After more than a decade of Pearl Jam-like success in Norway, Greni recently moved to Los Angeles, determined to break America the hard way. He, original drummer Olaf Olsen and new bassist Øyvind Storli Hoel now play clubs here with a set list that still rules Scandinavian festivals and is basically this album in your face: proven hits with forward thrust. Related Stories: • Fricke’s Picks: A Family Affair • Fricke’s Picks: Rebel Yellers • Fricke’s Picks: Mercury Rev
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Published: 2008-10-27
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News, Fricke's Picks
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Fricke’s Picks: Lobby LoydeWhen Australian guitarist Lobby Loyde died of lung cancer on April 21st at age sixty-five, that country lost its first homegrown guitar hero. Born John Baslington Lyde in Queensland in 1941, he was a founding architect and guardian spirit of Aussie garage rock and heavy music for more than three decades. Loyde’s playing — direct, muscular, frenzied — on Sixties hand-grenade singles by the Purple Hearts and the Wild Cherries and his bruising early-Seventies LPs with Coloured Balls also made him a long-distance inspiration to American fans such as Henry Rollins and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. None of those records were originally issued here, and Loyde never performed in the U.S. A recent series of deluxe import reissues will leave you wondering why. The ‘65-’67 singles and woodshed-fidelity demos on Benzedrine Beat! (Half a Cow) are everything Loyde cut with the Purple Hearts, a furious mod-R&B band modeled on the Yardbirds and the Pretty Things. But the Hearts’ distinguishing intensity was Loyde’s combination of terse, rhythmic attack and dynamic-swordplay leads, like Eric Clapton dogfighting with Jimmy Page. Loyde’s driving strum and flourishes, heightened with high-speed tremolo, is a big reason why the Hearts’ ‘66 single “Of Hopes and Dreams and Tombstones” is an Aussie-garage landmark. Loyde is on only eight tracks of a new Wild Cherries anthology, That’s Life (Half a Cow). But those ‘67 and ‘68 A and B sides are all explosive, freak-beat soul. Loyde doesn’t solo at length, but the dirty boom of his outbursts in “That’s Life” and his echo-drenched screams in “Krome Plated Yabby” blow through the lumpy production with psychedelic vengeance. (The rest of That’s Life is demos, etc., by earlier lineups — and no minor rave-up.) Loyde disciples AC/DC took Aussie power boogie to the world in the Seventies — but onl
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Published: 2007-06-03
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Fricke's Picks
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