Hearty Har: Radio Astro (BMG/digital outlets)

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Hearty Har: Radio Astro (BMG/digital outlets)

To give these two guys a break let's not mention their dad because too often that – as Julian Lennon would tell you – doesn't work in your favour much.

However the offspring of some Big Names (Ziggy Marley, Liza Minnelli, Jakob Dylan, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Zac Starkey, etc) have done very worthwhile work.

But let's just take this 11-song, post-punk but retro-garageband rock (and sometimes funk-rock), album – with sax -- at face value and say it's just what it is: pop-length songs delivered with a feel for Motown and the Knack as much as for Fifties pop (think Dion and the Belmonts) and raw sounds from the Pacific Northwest in the mid Sixties like the Sonics and Electric Prunes (as on Scream and Shout, Can't Keep Waiting, Get Down).

These guy also know their way around the tropes of mainstream Sixties pop-rock (Fare Thee Well) and unpretentious harmony psyche-pop (Waves of Ecstasy). And teenage frustration (Radio Man '56).

Always good to see a piece entitled Canyon of the Banshees, although this one isn't close to Roky Erickson or Jad Fair as you might think but opens with a fanfare like a Morricone spaghetti western soundtrack, then gets seriously into phasing and the whole Spanish/Mexican landscape of instrumental twang and desertscape guitars.

The perpetrators of this are Shane and Tyler whose surname is Fogerty.

They've toured in the dad John's band and of course were on the recent Fogerty's Factory where the family undertook slight revisions of a few of Father Fogerty's classic Creedence (and solo) songs.

That was kinda pointless . . . and maybe this album is too in that it doesn't reinvent any genre, makes no earth-changing statements or offer a breakout ht single.

However this is an album which, if listened to, many would enjoy for its lack of pretension and special pleading in an era when so many artists banner their socio-political virtues, want to be seen to be making Important Statements or relegate entertainment behind their artsy angst.

In many ways, it is the better for not being all that.

.

You can hear this album on Spotify here



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