CD REVIEW: RAZORBATS – Camp Rock

Shane | 17 March 2016 | Reply

CD REVIEW: RAZORBATS – Camp Rock
Self Destructo Records
17 September, 2015
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
9 ½ /10

“We are the kids of the 70s” sing Razorbats on Kids Of The 70s – but there’s no way, they’re far too young. Grandkids of the ‘70s, perhaps – hell, I’d even believe they were the bastard grandspawn of The Stooges and The New York Dolls. Did either of them tour frosty Norway forty years ago and hook up? Anyway – it’s an absolute killer song: all riffs and hooks and nostalgia and everything we love about hard rockin’ good times.

In fact, the same could be said for the entire album: it’s just that good, that catchy, that unapologetically and legitimately a throwback that it is so now it hurts. There’s nothing hipper than an anti-hipster, in our books. These cats are street walkin’ cheetah sons of bitches.

Planet Riff is the bomb – as denim-jacket-with-metal-patches as the kids in the cover photo, relative ballad (relative to the head shaking rockers on all sides) Desolation Highway has a juggernaut groove, Subway Grinder is an electric nihilistic love song to sex, Getaway’s riff builds and builds to a riffgasmic climax, Mess It Up so embodies 1982 metal that it practically has metal studs shooting through the speakers, whilst Betty Boop is exactly the same for 1979 punk.

Camp Rock is a fantastic nostalgia trip that isn’t afraid to be whatever it wants to be: heavy metal, punk – even the excellent boogie-meets-guitarey-new wave on final track Warhead, a strangled cry from a hospital bed of a lonely dude who got caught ogling the wrong girl… or was he stalking her? You be the judge.