235. Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head (1971)
















Track Listing

1. High Flyin' Baby
2. City Lights
3. Have You Seen My Baby
4. Yesterday's Numbers
5. Teenage Head
6. 32 20
7. Evil Hearted Ada
8. Doctor Boogie
9. Whiskey Woman

Review

Here's another great discovery. The Flamin' Groovies make an album of retro-rock with a very modern slant with their Teenage Head. A lot of the tracks here sound like something from the late 50's, early 60's, but there is something about the delivery which almost brings it closer to punk than their roots. The voice snarls through the songs, the production is inspired and the variety of tracks is truly impressive.

There have been many comparisons between this album and the Stones' Sticky Fingers, but frankly, they are very different albums and the comparison is not fair to either of them. There is also a blues tinge here but it is a much less straight forward record, it has the snarls of punk more than those that Mick is famous for. You might probably like this if you like Sticky Fingers, but they are very different albums. There is no Wild Horses here and there is no Evil-Hearted Ada in the Stones.

This ends up sounding very modern in the same way that modern bands do retro music, it is deeply rooted in classical Rock and Roll while having a style that is very unique to itself. There are some highlights here, title track is brilliant as is the gentler Whiskey Woman and Evil-Hearted Ada sounds like something by one of my favourite Portuguese performers, The Legendary Tiger Man (be sure to check him out). So you really need to listen to this, it is a lot of fun, it's hard and funny and exhilirating music, get it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Teenage Head
2. Whiskey Woman
3. Evil-Hearted Ada
4. Yesterday's Numbers

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 1971 Roy Loney left the Flamin Groovies, and was replaced by singer and guitarist Chris Wilson, who, along with Jordan, began to move the group in a more overtly power-pop direction. Between 1971 and 1976, very little was heard of the group except their 1972 anti-drug song "Slow Death". In 1976, they teamed up with British producer Dave Edmunds, and recorded an album entitled Shake Some Action. This LP and the following effort, Now, are good examples of their somewhat self-conscious attempt to revive the sound of the classic mid-'60s pop groups; the song "Shake Some Action" is perhaps their best-known and most emblematic recording. As Cyril Jordan told an interviewer, "The time that we were personifying had died in America years before. We were trying to put it into a capsule." The Groovies continued in the same style until the early 1980s.

No Flamin' Groovies on Youtube, so I'll do some Propaganda for my country and give you a video for Fuck Christmas I Got The Blues by The Legendary Tiger Man (very NSFW):