O.C. POP ALBUM REVIEWS : Travelin’ Bands Hit Points of Interest

Today’s crop of local album reviews finds Rod Piazza & the Mighty Flyers visiting Memphis (not to see Graceland, but to play the blues for their new live album) and Barrelhouse drawing its inspiration from Memphis via the Stax soul sound. Fu Manchu goes cruising with a hard-rock album about fun on wheels, and Atomic Boy tunefully vents its frustration at not getting the desired chain reaction from big-label deal-makers. Ratings range from * (grounded into double play) to **** (knocked it 450 feet over the center field fence). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

** 1/2

Rod Piazza & the Mighty Flyers

“Live at B.B. King’s, Memphis”

Big Mo

Here’s one for those nights when you want to get out of the house for some good-time blues but nothing good is playing in the vicinity.

The Riverside-based Piazza and his band don’t push traditional blues in new directions, nor are they concerned with tapping the deepest emotional possibilities of their genre. What they do best is play the blues with a rare verve and pleasure, and exceptional skill.

This 72 1/2-minute CD, drawn from two Beale Street club gigs in December, is loaded with hot, interactive playing that achieves a live album’s desired you-are-there effect.

Piazza applies his wry, conversational voice mainly to humorous songs about bad women and worse luck; he’d do well to go for more of a thematic mix. Musically, though, the program is reasonably diverse. Such numbers as the tense “Murder in the 1st Degree,” the sultry “Blue Hour,” and a slow-burning guitar showcase, “Down So Long,” balance lighter fare built on jumping rhythms.

Piazza’s harmonica playing is full of surprising twists, with the nervous leaps and slides of “Murder” a prime example. Guitarist Alex Shultz spins out solos that say something different and delightful with each chorus, while piano player Honey Piazza, the bandleader’s wife, can boogie hard or trill nimbly as the situation requires.

These three soloists also function well as supporting players who can add interesting accents to a song even when the focus of attention is elsewhere. The hollow, pinging quality of the digital piano is a drawback, although it is understandable that a hard-touring band without deep pockets would go for the easy portability and low-maintenance of an electronic keyboard.

Playing mostly original material by both Piazzas, the band keeps things cooking until the final number, an anticlimactic, slow-grinding “Mannish Boy” knockoff called “They Want Money.”

In it, Piazza grouchily brands all women as gold diggers. Some stereotypes just don’t fly anymore, and even as traditional an outfit as the Mighty Flyers had best evolve beyond them.

(Available from Big Mo Records, (800) 647-4583, or RR1 Box 389C, Norwich, VT 05055.)

** 1/2

Barrelhouse

“Blues on 10th ‘n’ Central”

The place name in the title of this self-financed cassette release refers to a band member’s pad in Seal Beach, but Barrelhouse’s sound issues straight from McLemore Avenue. That was the Memphis address of the Stax Records studio, birthplace of the gritty Southern soul music of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett.

Not many singers are up to emulating the likes of Redding and Pickett, but Barrelhouse front man Steave Ascasio is the authentic item. He is a natural soul singer with a rich, grainy voice that has real presence, coupled with the sensitivity and nuance to burrow deeply into a lyric.

You wouldn’t expect those qualities in a 25-year-old suburban kid from Laguna Niguel, but Ascasio joins blues man Robert Lucas and rockabilly Robert (Big Sandy) Williams as one of the best young roots-music singers on the local scene.

What’s more, Barrelhouse writes songs good enough that Redding or Pickett might have wanted to record them. The lyrics are simple but heartfelt, the funk grooves on the fast tunes are pulsating, and the ballad melodies--ballads being the cassette’s particular strength--are graceful.

The album is far from perfect. The arrangements cry out for the horns and keyboards of classic Southern soul; given the financial strictures of being a young, grass-roots band making a do-it-yourself recording, Barrelhouse sticks to a bare-bones, guitar-based sound.

Even within these limitations, the instrumental work could stand improvement. Guitarists Mark Cerneka and Dave Metzger do well with sparse, scratchy funk rhythms a la Stax stalwart Steve Cropper, but neither comes through with the confident, imaginative soloing that could have lifted several songs.

The band sounds most at home with “Mazy,” the album’s bluesiest track; elsewhere, the guitar solos are tentative, and the arrangements sometimes sputter.

Ascasio’s husky voice doesn’t have tremendous range; he periodically trots out a falsetto that is promising but still needs work. However, with a lot of sharpening and development, the potential is there for Barrelhouse to do something special with the Memphis soul sound. After the slick, bloated tributes of Michael Bolton and the mannered revivalism of the Black Crowes, it’s about time somebody did it right.

(Available from Barrelhouse. Call (714) 646-0968 or write 24295 Donner Court, Laguna Niguel, CA 92656.)

* Barrelhouse plays tonight at 8 at the Studio, 2951 Grace Lane, Costa Mesa, and April 23 at Club 5902 in Huntington Beach.

** 1/2

Fu Manchu

“No One Rides for Free”

Bong Load

Like it or not, a band can go far these days by recycling sounds from the biggest, dumbest mastodons of ‘70s arena rock.

Most of today’s twentysomething hard-rockers were not weaned on the Who, the Stones, Free and Mott the Hoople, bands for whom ideas and feelings on a personal scale actually mattered.

They were raised on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, purveyors of mass sensation who were content to bash them around inside their cranial housings.

Enough of all that--it’s time for grunge to go through a fruitful mutation. Maybe Fu Manchu can be part of that evolution.

Yes, the San Clemente band rides with the brutish beasts of the past on most of its first CD, an eight-song release that runs about 27 minutes. There are heavy riffs and tromping beats derived from Sabbath, the Zep, and such lesser ‘70s thunder lizards as Mountain, Grand Funk, Steppenwolf and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

There also is skimming of the heaviest ‘60s Cream as guitarist Eddie Glass (last heard from a few years back as the drummer of the punk band, Olivelawn) steps hard on his wah-wah pedal in a seeming homage to “White Room” at the end of “Superbird.”

But Fu Manchu also appears to have been listening to Sonic Youth, one of the smartest and most adventurous of the truly alternative bands of the 1980s.

From the Sonics, Fu Manchu takes a sense of hurtling motion, a darkly psychedelic ambience, and deadpan-cool vocal delivery. This is a case where limitation may be a strength: Singer Scott Hill is no titanic wailer like Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell, so he goes for an almost laid-back, sing-speak intonation that’s just right for the band’s songs about life on wheels.

Like those automotive-rebels from the ‘50s, James Dean and Marlon Brando, Hill speaks softly (at least for a hard-rock front man) and lets his big engines do the vrooming.

In another parallel to Sonic Youth, Fu Manchu’s is a music that probes restlessly, searching for some sort of release. Their chosen vehicle for thrills and escape is the van, that four-wheeled love nest/pot den/clubhouse where, as Hill sings in “Shine It On,” you can “delight in a world of your own.”

This sensibility isn’t elevated (the collection’s one quiet interlude is a soft-focus, hippie wet dream called “Free and Easy (Summer Girls)”). But it is magical and affirmative, and we could use more of that in today’s mostly baleful hard rock.

(Bong Load Records, P.O. Box 931538, Hollywood, CA 90093-1538.)

* Fu Manchu plays April 2 at Club Mesa in Costa Mesa, with Just Plain Big and Supernovice. (714) 642-8448.

** 1/2

Atomic Boy

“The Timebomb Tapes”

Hipnotic

Denny Lake, singer of this Orange County-Los Angeles band, does some of his most pointed writing in liner notes that chronicle how unnamed record companies treated Atomic Boy to the Hollywood runaround last year.

Lake comes to the positive conclusion that major labels are not necessarily the best judges of musical worth; hence Atomic Boy’s decision to stop waiting for the big contract and get its wares out on a tiny independent label.

Lake also can be fairly pointed in politicized songs targeting violent police, abortion opponents and the military-industrial complex. The problem with these songs, and with others about romantic ups and downs, is that he has little feel for language and how to make it vivid.

The lyrics are bland declarations ending in blockish rhymes; you’ll find cotton fields in Canada before you’ll encounter a metaphor, a memorable description, or a deft bit of word play on Atomic Boy’s 16-song cassette (included with new material are all five songs from the band’s 1992 debut CD, produced by Chris Carter of Dramarama).

In other respects, Atomic Boy is a worthy band.

It’s easy to see how Carter would be drawn to their sound, which has some of the energetic, bash-it-out spirit of Dramarama. The guitars slash and bite in a dense, catchy, hard-riffing attack.

Lake has no trouble mustering passion that often compensates for the drabness of his lyrics. He sounds like a chestier version of Husker Du’s Grant Hart on anthems such as “Time Bomb,” “Writing on the Wall” and “Everywhere & Nowhere.”

A bit of a John Lydon snarl emerges when Atomic Boy gets mad, as it does to good effect with “In Your Face,” a careening melodic-punk burner that rails at corrupt power and manages, if nothing else, to get some ya-yas out.

(Available for $10 from Hipnotic Records, c/o Kevin Pawlak, 8033 Sunset Blvd., Suite 589, Hollywood, CA 90046.

* Atomic Boy plays Tuesday at Club Mesa, 843 W. 19th St., Costa Mesa. (714) 642-6634.