SONICS - This Is The LP

“This Is The Sonics” follows the legendary “Here Are the Sonics” (1965) and “Boom” (1966) LPs which rocketed the Tacoma garage rock band into music history with a gritty, sped-up, brutal rock & roll attack that sounded like nothing that had come before. The Sonics single-handedly defined the genre of garage rock with their debut single “The Witch” (1964) at a time when upbeat, positive ditties were still the standard rock fare.

Now, “This Is The Sonics” (out March 31, 2015), released on their own Tacoma-based label Re:Vox Records, picks up where the band left off with 12 savage new songs. Producer Diamond, the Detroit force best known for his work with the White Stripes, Dirtbombs and Electric Six, recorded the new Sonics record in mono, live in the studio, with minimal overdubs, for a raw sound experience that befits their indelible legacy.

The Tacoma band’s new release This Is the Sonics is their first studio album of all-new material in 49 years, and that fact alone is staggering. What’s even more remarkable, though, is how one of garage rock’s most legendary bands has dared to test their legend by making a record that spits, snarls, drools, honks, wails, and screams as if it were 1966 all over again.

Granted, recording with Jim Diamond doesn’t hurt. The former Dirtbombs bassist and famed producer of the White Stripes’ self-titled debut spares no grime or fuzz. The album was recorded mono, live in the studio. “Bad Betty”, the most powerful original composition on the album, hints at the rock-appropriated folklore of Black Betty in its title while remaining gleefully ignorant of anything except how to pound a riff into the ground in execution. Vocalist/keyboardist Jerry Roslie sings of the wild, leather-clad woman who puts his own savagery to shame, the septeguenarian whooping and screeching like a tomcat in heat.