Sometimes, Only This Will Do

This'll tell you a little about where I'm at these days. My favorite new way to test my car's speakers on the drive home is to see how loud I can play Watch Out For This Thing, the new CD from Seattle's The Whore Moans. I heard them for the first time a few months back live on KEXP and have to say, their front man sounded even better with his voice all rasped out with a cold.

Last night I was trying to think of the right superlative, and it came to me this morning: utterly fucking primal. This guy's got a punk rock shriek that runs from the upper range of a three-year-old's scream to the lower registers of an accelerating F-15.

You can hear the whole album on CD Baby. Ten songs and not a single dog. Listen to Sweet As A Peach — my favorite moments are when the vocals first come ripping into the song and the split second of dead silence before the key change at 1:24 — or the anthemic Disappear, which rises to Fugazi-ish levels of awesomeness. This is one of those releases that, like Iggy Pop's Raw Power, Mission of Burma's EP, Fugazi's Thirteen Songs, or Gang of Four's Entertainment!, is destined to be a classic.

The video is from The Comet last February,