The Beat From 20,000 Garages (The Best of Rebels Vol.3) – Various Artists – album review

The latest Best of Rebels compilation from Raving Pop Blast! gives us ‘bands from around the world with a healthy DIY attitude, Garage, Pop-Psych, R&B, Freakbeat, Indie, Punk…it doesn’t really matter what you call them. It’s just Rock And Roll Music, played with passion.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself. Fighting Boredom have been listening, have a look at what we thought below.

It’s a plain brown cardboard box, it’s got FRAGILE tape around the top and sides and a handwritten ‘Do Not Bend!’ The clue is the Raving Pop Blast sticker on the side. I know what this is. I tear into it and remove the sleeve, a pastiche of those wonderful fifties sci-fi monster films of the fifties there’s a giant lizard chasing a crowd scattering records behind them. The title is worth the money alone ‘The Beat From 20,000 Garages’. Did I say that the record is bright, transparent yellow? No, well it is and it’s perfect. This is going straight on. 

I set the volume to brainshakingly nastily high and whack the bass and treble up too. Stick it on the turntable and wait. There’s barely a crackle. Brand new vinyl, lovely. 

There are sixteen little slices of Rock’n’Roll wonderfulness here, only one breaking the three minute barrier and as that one is by The Total Rejection I’ll let them off. Sixteen new bands to obsess, hunt down and discover. Sixteen songs to break your hips and knees to as you groove manically around the house. 

This is, of course, all about the Groove. All about the attitude. Raving Pop Blast maintains that this is a healthy DIY attitude. Me, well I think it’s a matter of being cool. The groove has to be cool, it’s got to have teeth and it’s got to make your hips shake and brain fizz like decades old sherbet. If you don’t know what I mean, you’re lost. Get back to the groove. Let me show you the way.

The sixteen bands here are reprobates from all around the globe. Picked out by the heads at Raving Pop Blast!  Put the needle down on the slab of yellow at any point and you may get a distorted blues shrieker telling you he is a dog, or a pulsing organ with a spooky screaming rock’n’roll lo fi vocal. There’s proper nasty fuzz with a sweet vocal warning you to get off the road. Smooth flowing hippy pop goodness and a nutter in a Mexican wrestler mask singing punked up rockabilly with added saxophone. I could go on but you need to get this madness deep in your head.

Stick it on, turn it up and watch you don’t slip a disc with the grooves. That’s probably when you’ll realise that if this is volume three then there must be two more of these out there ready for you to find. 

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Raving Pop Blast! have a Bandcamp page and are on Facebook.

All words by Adrian Bloxham.