Since I discovered them about almost 30 years ago, the Wildhearts have been one of my favorite bands. Of all time. Top 5. Maybe even Top 3. I like to describe them as the crunching riffage of mid-period Metallica with the harmonies of The Sweet, and the songwriting of Paul Westerberg. Most of the credit of the Wildhearts goes to lead singer/guitarist and main songwriter Ginger, who has an incredible knack for songwriting. He also had a big talent for picking bandmates. How do I know this? From their post-Wildhearts releases. When he left the Wildhearts, bassist Danny formed the Yo-Yos and released one of my top 30 albums of all time, “Uppers And Downers”. And his other band, the Main Grains are no slouches either.
Lead guitarist, CJ, is also no slouch. He has also had a slew of releases and bands from his time outside of the Wildhearts including Honeycrack and the Jellys, And he’s really been on a rockin’ roll with his last few albums under his name CJ Wildheart. One thing that all these post Wildhearts releases show, is that Ginger didn’t do this all himself. He had some help from his bandmates and these records prove it. The quality is really good, in fact so good that I would say better than a lot of Ginger’s solo work (which is a huge compliment).
CJ’s last album, “Slots”, was an excellent blast of melodic fast and heavy hard punk rockin’ music. And his latest release, “Devil”, is right along the same lines. “Nein Nein Nein” starts the album off with a bang. No intro, no leadup, just POW right in the kisser. High energy melodic kick ass rockin’ music. And with the exception of a 2 second sample at the beginning of the next song, “The Art Of Being Free”, it doesn’t let up until 33 minutes later. All fast. All hard. All catchy. All great. You barely have time to take a breath, it hits you so hard. No dumb ballads to slow anything down. Well the last song “Fade” is slightly slower than the rest of the album, but it makes a good closer to the album. Now this sounds like it’s going to be all one dimensional, but it’s not. All have the characteristic Wildheart-esque charm and are very sing-a-longy. Which like I said before, goes to prove just how much CJ had in the Wildhearts’ sound.
The cover of Soul Asylum’s “Sometime To Return” fits in perfectly, and if you’re familiar with and like that song, you’ll like the rest of the album. Fast, hard, melodic. You get the picture. “Diva” is an urgent punk rockish type of song, with the melodies bubbling up to the top. Other highlights are some great Chuck Berry-like soloing on “SOB”. Nice call and response vocals on “Rotten”. “One Of The Boys” is extremely catchy. Then there’s the heavy, groovy, pounding (but still fast) “No More”. Seriously, every song has some sort of highlight. This is one of those albums where your favorite song will change with each listen. Strong contender for Album Of The Year.
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