STORMIN’ THROUGH THE MIDNIGHT SHIFT
As a city where the populace chews steel for a living, Pittsburgh is an unlikely birthplace for a significant rock band (the Jaggerz don’t count). Heavy-metal dinosaurs excepted, it’s not a city actually jumping with rock ’n’ roll, probably because its citizenry has to work like dogs just to make ends meet.
IRON CITY HOUSEROCKERS
Have A Good Time (But Get Out Alive) (MCA)
As a city where the populace chews steel for a living, Pittsburgh is an unlikely birthplace for a significant rock band (the Jaggerz don’t count). Heavy-metal dinosaurs excepted, it’s not a city actually jumping with rock ’n’ roll, probably because its citizenry has to work like dogs just to make ends meet. One cannot be a Soho artist in the Iron City.
It is around the sweat and grime of the work ethic which keeps their hometown in motion that the Iron City Houserockers were formed. The band’s music sounds so desperately alive that it’s as if they recorded it after a 12-hour shift at the mill. Yet it isn’t the hopelessness of enslavement to some lousy job that prompts the heroic urgency of their music but the Puritanical belief that hard work provides its own reward. Indeed, there must be a scrap of truth to such a maxim since Have a Good Time (But Get Out Alive), from start to finish^ roars like the fiery blast of aioundry furnace.