BOOGIE
WOOGIE RUMBLE - The Safes (Pro-Vel)
If you took a bunch of guitars, drums, amps, and microphones and kicked them
down a few flights of stairs, you'd come pretty close to duplicating what
The Safes have achieved on this five-song EP.
Chicago's O'Malley brothers (Frankie, Michael, and Patrick) and drummer Doug
James hit the ground running with "Mind Meltdown" and it all zips
by in a near-breathless, spiralling, dizzying rush, only stopping along the
way for scrap parts from the punk junkyard.
Produced by Detroit's go-to guy, Jim Diamond, "Boogie Woogie Rumble"
is nothing fancy, the essence of drive and simplicity, with all of the fat
trimmed back. Wisely, Diamond apparently didn't try to rein the band in too
much but rather allowed them to steamroll straight ahead and kick up quite
a righteous cloud of dust with a whirlwind of good old-fashioned
power-chord crunch.
"Wired" is a ragged, stuttering excuse for The Safes to bay at the
moon and, in the words of Alice Cooper, blast away the clouds. "Mental
Wheelchair" opens with a menacing flourish of filling-rattling drums
and slice-and-dice guitar and eventually manages to throw in a wiry, trashy
misfit of a guitar solo for texture. It would sure be interesting to see what
their weekly bill for fuses and guitar strings looks like.
With brash confidence, The Safes wield three chords that kick like a mule
and buzz like those African killer bees that were supposedly on their way
to the States a while back. Barflies looking for a touchstone may find solace
in slotting these guys somewhere between the types of 60's US garage/punk
bands memorialized on endless Pebbles and Nuggets compilations and snarling
70's anti-heroes like the Dead Boys. Aside from the cover art, though, it's
hard to fathom the Cheap Trick comparisons being thrown around.
Sonically speaking, perhaps the most revealing thing about "Boogie Woogie
Rumble" is that bands treading the boards in the Windy City and the Murder
City may be a lot closer than the few hundred miles that separates them. Methinks
that ain't such a bad thing. - Clark
Paull
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