Gaza Strippers
Laced Candy
Man’s Ruin
Rick Sims is the only person I know who can play the shit out of his guitar while singing with a voice that sounds like a man in great distress. The combination of breakneck fuzz riffing and barely-strangled yelp is Sims’ signature, present in the Didjits, muted in the Supersuckers (where he only played guitar) and blasting out of the Gaza Strippers.
The Strippers as a whole rock out so straight, they might as well be playing Budokan to hordes of screaming Japanese. The most exotic this gets is the closing cover of Love and Rockets’ “Yin and Yang and the Flower Pot Man,” where the band feeds some premium coal to the chugging locomotive Love and Rockets created and prays it doesn’t jump the tracks.
Man’s Ruin Records, 610 22nd Street #302, San Francisco, CA 94107; http://www.mansruin.com
