thesonicrace epThese boys come outta the blocks right at your face and do their best to tear it off. So you’re dancing like a middle-aged dickhead in the living room (or I am, anyway), loving the sharp, smart changes, the handclaps, the groove, the bounce and bluster.

Given the band and the song this website is named for (it's not Pinky and Perky, nor New Order, nor The Smiths. Give up..?) it’s almost a no-brainer that you’d probably enjoy “The Sonic Race” EP.

In fact, I’d say this: if you’d never heard Birdman, MC5, Stooges, Dictators or the Dolls … or anyone like them, and you heard The Sonic Race… you would go out and buy an instrument and learn how to play it, and drag people in until you could all go out and play like demons and lay waste the countryside.

Huge, growling guitars rush at you on a constant surging assault, the structure of their songs shift, shimmy and change. It ain’t predictable, they’ve got a  simple, ripplingly attractive style … that should all get you in … will the songs stay with you?

I reckon so. For one thing, there’s more narrative here than last time, fewer lyrics, more power and arguably better production. Second, the twin guitars rip at you with that crazy imperative; who said the Motor City sound can’t travel to another language, that it’s rooted in one place and ya gotta have those yankee connections ..? 

Horseshit is what that is. Spain is hardly a rich country, and of those few who are rich, you wouldn’t expect the pampered offspring to produce a controlled, aimed and precise frenzy like this, nor the occasional wry, darkly humour which seeps through. The Sonic Race have something you won’t find hardly anywhere, and this EP is a huge achievement (and Fernando Marin’s production is mighty fine). 

If you ain’t got into The Sonic Race yet, you don’t like rock’n’roll, and you have no business reading or even glancing at this website. ‘The Sonic Race’ is a better LP than their last, and it really damn burns.

Someone asked me the other day about musical documentaries: if I fell over the funding, there’s about four different Australian-esque musicians/ bands I’d love to do a doc on; follow around and film the band and the dancing crowds. There’s only about two or three in Europe: Sonic Race would be one. 

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