One-minute reviews - 1: Rowland S. Howard, The Mint Chicks, Eddie Hinton, Reverend Horton Heat

Self-explanatory, really. Fuck reviewing albums in 140 characters or less. Anyone with half an ear and an eye for Elmore Leonard dialogue can do that. The real challenge is: can you say everything that needs to be said, given only 60 seconds on the clock?


Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes
Ex-Birthday Party guitarist dude creates new sullen noise-skewed album that matches Mary Chain depression to Shangri-La's beauty and a handful of Lee Hazlewood licks. Not either as beautiful or morbid as it sounds, needs proper vocalist. You should bow to no one in yr appreciation of Howard's abrasive tangled instrumentation, though.

The Mint Chicks - Screens
Nasty but mesmeric Kiwi psychedelic noise, full of sequenced vocals and over-saturated phlegms of noise: like Times New Viking fed back through a tape loop of Talk Talk B-sides. Everything is turned way too high, and that's the way it should be.

Eddie Hinton - Very Extremely Dangerous
Dude from the 70s makes like dude from the 60s, or is it dude from the 80s makes like dude from the 70s? Either way: incredible Muscle Shoals brass - the type that introduced the word 'muscular' to the rock lexicon - wails a storm of intention and sweet soul behind a dude who could be easily be taken for Otis Redding if you were squinting and not aware he's been dead for close on 40 years now. A dead cert for Jools Holland, if only the record had been made a couple of months back.

Reverend Horton Heat - Laughin' And Cryin' With The Reverend Heat
The good reverend drops a few aitches, drops the serious guard for a mo', kicks back, remembers his vow to be true to the faithful as the Vicar of Vice, the Deacon of Despair and lets rip with a sortie of good-natured, drinkin', lechin' and lyin' songs that twang and yowl in all the correct places, with all the correct incorrect intentions. Sweet as Swaggart.