Heroine Sheiks
Journey To The End Of The Knife
Amphetamine Reptile Records
Heroine Sheiks main man Shannon Selberg is one of America's most under-rated vocalists and lyricists:- easily dismissed as a crazy person due to his onstage exuberance, he's a master of getting a lot out of a little - painting lyrical scenarios of low-life and sleaze with just a few well chosen words set against his own brand funky punk.
Journey is the Sheiks fourth album and features an all new band line-up with Selberg having moved back home to his native Minneapolis after a spell in New York. The music retains the characteristics of the other Sheiks albums - a natural extension to the sound of Selberg's former band The Cows - but this album has more of a homebrew feel than it's predecessor Out Of Aferica. Opening track Be A Man is a stormer, a joyous slab of noise pop which you'll be singing along with at the first chorus, followed by the punked-up thrash of Hank's Pimp (an unsavoury jailhouse yarn if ever I heard one).
It's not their strongest album - both musically and lyrically it's less adventurous than previous releases and it clocks in at a modest 28 minutes for 8 songs (one of which is a bootleg-quality live track). Still, it has moments of sheer genius, with the lyrically dark Meurte Vous and the spaced-out groove of Co-Angle Phenomenon. AmRep are only printing a thousand of these, so if you're a Selberg fan you'd best get yourself a copy pretty damn sharp. Recommended ...and would have got more stars if it had more tracks.
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