ROCK • A • RAMA

ROCK A RAMA

This month’s Rock-A-Ramas were written by Richard Riegel, Michael Davis, Richard C. Walls, John Morthland and Jim Feldman.

DIVINYLS—Desperate (Chrysalis):: The Australian pop hegemony apparently continues unabated, to judge by the energy of the Divinyls, a woman and' four men at work enlarging our scope of the varieties of Antipodean rock. Emphasis here is on a hardrocking, somewhat adolescent fascination with sleaze for its own sake (best way to move into the real thing), reportedly a big fact of life in the Divinyls’ “Sin Capital” Kings Cross area of Sydney. Lead mouth (real big lips for a ’Roo) Christina Amphlett gets off some rather basic sex posturing in her attitudes and her vocals, which jerk between Benatarian melodrama and Marianne Faithfull used & abused holy gruffness, with a few Lovichish birdbath trills thrown in for flavoring; Ms. Amphlett’s erotic-slur message to malehood around the globe seems to be: “Come hither, but not too fast...” Video starstardom inevitably beckons to these raunchy Divinyls, need I add. R.R.

LEROI BROTHERS-Check This Action (Amazing):: You could lump the LeRoi Brothers in with rockabilly revivalists were they not so assured of those roots that they think nothing of beefing them up with mid-’60s trash-rock, surf guitar, or anything else that sounds sufficiently crude and vulgar. Whatever it is, they attack their material with the intensity and vehemence of a hard-core band—they’re just playing a different set of changes. This is the most raucous album I’ve heard in ages. It sounds like it was recorded in the back room of a Cincinnati furniture store in 1953, and any band that can pull that off tn 1983 is definitely onto something good. (Amazing Records, P.O. Box 26265, Fort Worth, TX 76116) J.M.

RODWAY—Horizontal Hold (Millennium) :: Mr. Steve Rodway, identified here as a former synthesizer programmer for the Buggies (Oh boy! Whoop-de-do!) goes on line with his own poppy vokes and synths on this debut, and the results are rather beneath ho-hum, thanks to Rodway’s overly familiar Hollywood drug emporium cowpokey lyrics. Yeah, we all know how big Toto has made it with this sorta stuff, but my own conviction is that those of the studio musician mentality should stay the hell in there! R.R.

QUIET RIOT-Metal Health (Pasha):: Met al’s gonna be with us permanent, no matter what anybody says, so the usual love-it-orleave-it strictures apply here, but Quiet Riot are more interesting than most of the other “new” metal entries. Q.R. suckered me in initially by covering a Slade(!) tune, “Cum On Feel The Noize,” and their rendition skips on my phono, just like the original Slade earball-melters often did (could be some incredibly subtle promo gimmick) . Then I noticed that Kevin DuBrow’s vocals are as shrill and uvula-busting & fine as Noddy Holder’s throughout Metal health. And after that, I discovered Quiet Riot are rich in guitar thrash (less grind & grunge to the bar) & are sometimes almost hardcore-incoherent in their lyrical assault, i.e., they ain’t bad at all! Cancel my order for the gross of self-stick labels, Walter Drake. R.R.

NICO—Procession (V2 Records):: Tittuping through the urban necropolis, this anchoress of the joyful apocalypse has been exploring the fatigable ever since her wandering days with the Velvet Underground and the Plastic Exploding Inevitable. And still she maintains. This little EP is by far the best thing she’s done since her best solo effort, Desert Shore. Leaping through four songs with marmoreal insistence, she still elicits, with lizard-like glee, ceaseless wonderment, her voice ever like some demented chaconne to increation. “Secret Side,” “Femme Fatale,” the title track, and the. bestilling “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” are, to but put it simply, brilliant. If you don’t own this, you’re just SOL. Now I know why some people have dreams about her, especially dreams about bowling with her. Later. j the f

EVERYMAN BAND (ECM):: You may know these guys from Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby or any one of his Arista albums, not that this is Reed-like fare—it’s sorta like fustion music, if fusion music had gone the way of N.Y. tuff instead of L A. slick. The songs alternate between jabbing, staccato, pinched-nerve anthems (“Morals In The Mud,” “Japan Smiles”) and more programmatic pieces (“Lonely Streets,” “Nuclear Suite”) showing off saxist Martin Fogel’s excellent jazz chops and David Torn’s intense but lovable guitar style. Pretty good. (The promo sheet that came with the record quotes a Paris newspaper as saying “this is truly music for the ’80s,” which just goes to show that Europeans can be every bit as inane as Americans.) R.C.W.

THE JOHNNY VAN ZANT BAND-The Last Of The Wild Ones (Polydor):: Whenever I listen to this band or to ,.38 Special, I inevitably wonder why the surviving Van Zant brothers don’t share the tragically departed Ronnie’s lyrical gifts (Lynyrd Skynyrd, the wittiest^Southern rock band ever), and then I remember Ray and Dave Davies, and recall the fact that close siblings aren’t necessarily equally blessed in the written-word dept. Johnny’s lyrics seem so the-road-is-all-I-know pedestrian after Ronnie’s crackerjack brain teasers, but at least the Johnny Van Zant band’s sound is more straightforwardly arena-grungy than bro Donnie’s .38 Special I-can-do-ballads-every-bit-aswimpy-as-Journey’s approach of late. R.R.

Ph. D.-Is It Safe? (Atlantic):: Very. M.D. SINGLE BULLET THEORY (Nemperor):: This album has such fine cover art—a photograph of many fluorescent-hued water pistols poised to squirt—that I hesitate to question any aspect of the record itself, but the jacket just doesn’t fit. Single Bullet Theory ate one of those groups so desperate to make bright pure pop that you know they’re going to include at least one balding guy still hard on the tail of the elusive teendreams (cf. The Producers), and of course S.B.T. do. Nice rich organ fills here and there, but the vocals are rather obscure and neutral, almost arty garbles at times, for such outwardly exhuberant purest-of-the-pop. But that cover’s one of the immortal ones. R.R. ^