The Dragons

Rock N Roll Kamikaze (Junk)
by Jon Sarre

Mebbe Rock’n’Roll Kamikaze ain’t exactly accurate cuz The Dragons come off here as older tho’ not necessarily wiser, but it’s like they stepped back and looked around a bit since they did their last full-length Rock like Fuck. They don’t seem like they’re bound for a suicide mission for glory, mebbe realism’s more like it. Mario Escovedo’s whiskey-scarred throat relates his down-on-his-bad-luck tales like an everyman lost in the bar of his life, where everyday’s overcast, at least when he’s around in the daytime. It almost seems like the songs on this record are set in phone booths at 4 am – one way conversations with some girl who left the show before Mario and the rest of the band: Ken Horne (guitar), Steve Rodriquez (bass) and Jarrod Lucus (drums) finished their Jack and Cokes and broke down the gear. Mario’s heart is the soundtrack on his sleeve – Johnny Thunders riffs’n’a rhythm section interpreting the whole rock’n’roll canon of drums’n’bass since at least 1976. The past is the present mebbe as far as the present is somethin’ to aspire to: Onetwothreefours and c’mon’s and lessgo’s and whoh-whohs and alrights and if that’s by the numbers, then that’s just cuz the Dragons know what those numbers mean.
(www.thedragons.com)