The Higher State – Volume 27

Folksiness, Farfisa and fuzz guitar on fifth LP from Kent's garage stalwarts!

The Higher State's fifth long-player is on store shelves now (or more accurately available to order online) and does not dissappoint. Ten years into their tenure the band is now distilled to a three-piece; Marty Ratcliffe on guitar/vocals/organ, Paul Messis on bass/guitar and Scarlett Rickard on drums. With the writing split between Ratcliffe and Messis.

The touchstones of The Byrds, Love and The Electric Prunes are here to satisfy the faithful, but despite their love of US garage the band have a distinctly (English) personality of their own. To call Volume 27 a protest album may be a step too far but there is a state-of-the-nation thread that runs though the record.

Musically there's folksiness, Farfisa and fuzz guitar, with production values geared towards treble-friendly AM radio. The ear-splitting guitar solos and frantic drumming are balanced by the gentler folk-rock type tracks which helps hold it together as an album. (Unlike a lot of garage LPs which all too often sound like a cobbled together collection of A and B-sides)

For a musical form that was supposedly crystalised and archived on Lenny Kaye's Nuggets compilation it comes across here as in pretty good shape and the perfect tool to kick against thepricks of today.

To paraphrase The Who - “Garage rock is dead they say. Long live garage rock!”

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Graham Day & The Forefathers - Good Things

Medway garage legends take a trawl through their own back pages on new album.

Don't look back. So have said such wise luminaries as John Lee Hooker, Bob Dylan and Oasis through rock's history. Admirable sentiments, but in their defence they probably weren't familiar with the recorded output one Mr. Graham Day. As a member of The Prisoners, The Prime Movers and The Solarflares, as well as more recently in The Buff Medways and Graham Day & The Gaolers, Day has lit up the garage rock firmament for over 3 decades.

For the Medway mod-rocker's latest LP he's teamed up with two of his old musical cohorts to breathe new life into some of the best songs of his 30-year career. New band Graham Day & The Forefathers sees Graham re-unite with bassist Alan Crockford (also ex-Prisoners/Prime Movers/Solarflares) and drummer Wolf Howard (Prime Movers/Solar Flares/James Taylor Quartet/Buff Medways).

After a debut single earlier in the year (Love Me Lies on State Records), the band are now releasing Good Things, an album that's made up of newly recorded versions of Day's songs from his time in The Solarflares, The Prisoners and The Prime Movers. There's also room for a couple of tracks from Day's most recent band, Graham Day & The Gaolers.

Good Things is the first LP on the newly resurrected Own-Up Records and is everything you'd expect from a Medway garage record. A mix of '60s R&B, mod-rock swagger, and incendiary power trio bite. With the backing tracks recorded quickly and live in one session and vocals added later via computer, (the one concession to modern techniques), it has that eternal raw garage feel that never seems to lose its appeal.

There's a rare level of intuitive playing and understanding between the trio that can only have come by having shared countless gigs. By covering songs from your own back catalogue there's always a danger of treading water, but there's more attitude and sonic attack on this album than most bands half their age could muster. Make no mistake, this is no half-arsed re-hash.

It's an album that works well as a alternative greatest hits set, though if this is your first experience of the Graham Day sound it will certainly whet your appetite for a more detailed delve into his previous records. You could argue that by re-visiting their own songbook Day & The Forefathers are resting on their laurels, but when the results sound this good frankly who cares.

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