Calling yourself Badd Music might be the obvious invitation for critics and detractors to make jokes at your expense. The best defence, therefore, is to make your Badd Music really good so that they have no critical leg to stand on. Thankfully, Badd Music, the album and the band, is great.
Great if you like raw blends of first-wave punk, both the stuff that exploded out of UK art schools and unlicensed Californian hardcore gigs alike, the later pop-punk which evolved from it and just a touch of the Oi! scenes rough and rowdy ethic. And I do. Very much.
This debut errs on the fast and furious but then you don’t come to such bands for balladry and ambience. Strung Out is ragged, riotous and relentless, an incendiary delivery spiked with metal-esque solos and thunderous staccato drum dynamics and 24th & Monroe is paced more like a rabid garage rock groover. Strikes and Gutters is built on bombastic bass and fist in the air, singalong vocals whilst King Cobra pushes its street punk credentials through a more underground rock and roll sound.
Like all good punk music it is political…or at least full of social commentary, is honest and unadorned, it looks you square in the eye whilst it sonically kicks you in the crotch. Still, all is fair in love and music, I suspect you have done something to deserve it.
