Young, Tight And Alright

Sometimes a band, a song, an album comes hurtling outta the primordial ooze with such teeth-gnashing force and insurgent brilliance it knocks you in the chest like some kinda rock’n’roll one inch punch. Oof! Your new rock heroes? Fuck them! These moments are rock’n’roll Watergate and the The band’s are Nixon. The latest of these ball lightning berserkers are Digger And The Pussycats and their opening salvo is Young, Tight And Alright.

Bursting from the ashes of Fort Mary (not counting about a million other smoldering or firing-on-all-cylinders ensembles), Digger are good pals Sam Agostino on axe and vocals (and then some) and corkscrew-locked Andy Moore on drums and vocals and possibly red cordial. For a band who find their niche primarily in synapse-frying live shows—the usual vomit-inducing ‘seeing is believing’ clichés don’t even get close to their rock’n’blues aerobics, Oz style—the group’s debut album is impressive in its energy. Such a primal blooze riot can be hard to capture on record; recent co-headliner Bob Log III suffers from a killer live sound that never quite convinces on disc. But these kids are smart; they know that once the energy dies down, if you’ve got no tunes, you’re out the door like so many rock shysters. Opener “Motorbike”’s buzz-saw riff and yell and response vocal tears its way into your psyche, setting the tone for the rest of the album. Their reworking of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down” is easy sleazy, grotty blues scrofulation for beginners; when Sam grunts “this stuff I got/It’ll blow your brains out baby”, it’s like that Kevin Smith gag about Superman’s hot white jizz busting a hole in Lois Lane’s back, or that bog body whose abscess exploded through the side of his skull—sickeningly, undeniably and primally thrilling. The aching “History Of Adultery” is like the ragged little brother of AC/DC’s “Ride On”; the line “I love my baby / So when I go out cheatin’ / I find a girl who looks exactly the same / If I’m lucky she’ll have the same name / Over and over again” surely shoots straight into the annals of great rock’n’roll lyricism.

Save the occasional directionless moment (the danger of such basic soundz is of course that, when laid out bare, they can run thin), Young, Tight And Alright is a rip-roaring debut. In their loose re-approximation of the blues-via-punk, Digger And The Pussycats have neither Jack White’s self-consciousness nor Dan Auerbach’s alarming premature weariness, just a whole buncha great tunes, exciting promise for the future and enough energy to jam a rocket up the ass of the old guard.