The Drags – Stop Rock and Roll! – Review

The Drags

Stop Rock and Roll! (Estrus)
by Jon Sarre

Albuquerque, NM, is not known for a whole helluvalot. It’s where Bugs Bunny always made that wrong turn, it’s where the TV newsman said a Circle K clerk got murdered seemingly every night when I lived in Santa Fe. Albuquerque is the largest city in New Mexico, but bein’ the metropolis of a state that sees fit to add “USA” to its license plates lest people think it’s merely a nicer part of Old Mexico, well, let’s just stop there. But that could all change soon, once the nation gets a whiff of this new Drags record, Stop Rock and Roll! The thing fucking smokes, Jack, and you may find yerself packing yer carpetbag, the first on yer block to move out to the desert, cuz the Drags are gonna put Albuquerque on the map.

Throw this ‘un on and you get hit wit’ a teaser surfin’ instrumental called “Bacon Striptease.” Don’t panic, pal, that’s just a warm-up. Before you know it, you’re shocked into garage-trash hell with “Who’s Got the Electricity”- that ain’t even a question cuz the Drags got the juice sure as I’m standin’ here. By the time you hit “Explosives,” a true demolition fetishist’s paean to blowin’ shit up, you’re hooked! Forget it!

Maybe “Iron Curtain Rock” can be dismissed as this three-piece’s hit-or-miss stab at some kind of undefined political whateveryacallit, but “Tastes Like Poison,” “Not So Good Luck Charm,” and “Conspiracy” are brilliant, short, and mean-spirited takes on uh… girls and shit, done in the vein of, but not mimicking, past garage cretin heroes. “What else?” you gotta ask, well, there’s this Stones tribute called “Anti-Satisfaction” and a Crampesque cover of the Nips’ “Private Eye,” plus three more burnin’ originals crammed into this nineteen-minute screed (fuckin’ well worth the money!). Even if ya never again think of Albuquerque, you oughta think long and hard about the Drags and Stop Rock and Roll! Buy, now!
(PO Box 2125 Bellingham, WA 98227)