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love

  • Love-Child-AlbumOnce upon a time blues had led rock to a powerful, muscular, emotional place. 

    You don’t see this much anymore. And most of the practitioners who plod from town to town are long, long past their relevance (never mind their heyday).

    But Love Child from Sydney...now here’s the kind of band you want to see on a Saturday night but you’re not allowed out anymore. There are no duff musicians here, it’s all tight and glossy and yearning. The singer, Steve Hancock, has the sort of voice which swells men’s chests and moistens um, erm, lady’s lips. He really knows how to belt a song out. The girls must heave themselves at him like despairing lemmings.

  • i-love-my-tractorIf you've seen them you'll know exactly what to expect from a live album by Cosmic Psychos. "I Love My Tractor" is chockablock full of cranky guitars, yobbish vocals, a big backbeat and all-pervading bass.

  • love-battlefieldHere's where the affair ended, for a time - I never got into the sound of "Love Is a Battlefield…" There were some great songs (or singles) here, for sure ("Missing Me, Missing You", "Don't Wanna See You Cry", "Just Being With You") that were among the band's best, but there was something about the shiny, semi-polished metallic sheen (coming after the confusing "Dickcheese") that pushed this album to the back of the collection.

  • ReeltorealcoverLet’s make the assumption that many people reading this will never have heard anything from Californian band Love’s substantial back catalogue and they’ll barely know the band’s singer and only constant member, the late Arthur Lee.

    There might be a vague recollection of “My Little Red Book” (a Burt Bacharach-Hal David cover, for gawdsake) or the New Christs’ flint-hard version of “She Comes In Colours” (on the “Pedestal” EP). But that's it.