Gallon Drunk — You, The Night....And The Music

You, the night …and the music is an reissue of Gallon Drunk's debut album from 1992 and it's a great devilish, sleazy and often messy mix of psychobilly, garage rock, surf, noir sounscapes, down ‘n’ dirty jazz tone and smoking shit kicking cinematic. With James Johnston lead singing raging and staggering over the tracks vibrate and sleaze sonic crash like a beat-up and gone punk Elvis impersonator meets early Nick Cave with a hint of Mark E Smith rant.

The bands sound is built around pumped up, manic and shambolic rock ‘n’ roll to surf guitar elements, double bass like shuddering back bone, bounding and crashing drum work which is a mixture of jazz, rock and revered up lounge rhythms. With runaway and pumped up and often slamming organ/ piano tone and the odd squawking sax tone too.  This certainly is not what you’d expect from a band that were born into 1990’s uk scene that was getting into it’s Brit pop groove- this is music for go- go dancing, gone bad sheriffs, drink until you drop  50’s/ 60’s landscape but with a shamobloic and punked edge.  This would work great as a backing to any of Russ Meyer 1950’s black and white roughie’s- that's a world made up of powerful/ nasty huge breasted criminal women , psychotic biker gangs, drunk and gone to seed preachers. Yet for all it’s retro feel this is not copy cat stuff -the  band  really managed to brew up some very original if ramshackle and sleazy sonic fair.

So all in all a down and dirty debut album that you cant help but get sucked into, heavy in 1950’s to 1960’s Americana yet pumped with really energy and punked glory- but this is not music with a message this is music to get very drunk to and dance like an idiot to Amen!.