HARDWARES

Hands, er, down, Seattle’s Zero Down are America’s best unsigned band, and to be that, you gotta have more than one beer-bongin’ record of clanging rock God-ness, and well, Zero Down have two, ‘05’s Old Time Revival and now this Ed Repka-painted ripper. Wild West snake-charming codger with a Gatling gun? Get outta town or die tryin’! It’s the perfect image for this band’s wisenheimer biker-bloody roots rock, “Hawk-the-mountain” roaring above a molten stomp like the most commercial stuff ever to come out of Tank and Warfare, crossed with the southern stomp of forgotten bike icons The Boyzz or Australia’s hapless yet loveable Heaven. At the maniacal extreme there’s Motorhead and on a sweet ‘n’ sinewy tack, Thin Lizzy. But most potent is the guitar-slingin’ middle ground that sounds like the nasty Nugent of now (Craveman and Love Grenade), highlights being ‘Knotty Pine’ and ‘Die Wasted’, both globbed up with finger-in-socket electrics applied to anthemic manna from The Marquee. Who’d have thought the best bullet-belted NWOBHM band in the business would come from Seattle? Punch, kapow, wallop… it’s one after another, until all ten have sweated out of yer pores in a perfect 40 minutes of heavy, snake-bit hookery.