The other week I reviewed an album with one song on that was half an hour long.
Jonny Manak And The Depressives see that shit, and they raise you a full 12 track album in 23 minutes. That gives them time to spare for whatever they can do in 420 seconds.
The subtext here: Jonny Manak can do it faster than me when I saw Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” video in 1988. I was 13 years old, give me a break.
Jonny Manak hasn’t come out of San Jose to mess about. Nor has he come out of California to take life too seriously.
For one thing, I am assuming his “friends in the adult film industry don’t really call him “Man” (it’s cool if they do, they call me “Big And” on the circuit, just sayin’……) for another I am assuming that his alter ego isn’t a Russian Drag Queen called Vladimir Puta. And also, I am just gonna go out on a limb here and offer the thought that any band that merrily includes a punk cover of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” probably isn’t after a Nobel Prize For Literature.
However, what is abundantly clear, right from the get-go of this thing, is that Jonny Manak And The Depressives are the kings of the two minute rock n roll boogie. The title track sets the stall out. It sounds like it wants a fight with anyone in the sandpit, but it’s a fully formed song.
“Sick Of Feeling Sick” is done, and sniffing glue out the back with the ner-do-wells before you’ve even taken your coat off and Manak’s guitar solo’s are magnificent. “Sticks And Stones” is like The Replacements after a Sunny Delight binge, and there’s a cartoonish thing all through this.
Unless you’re Bart Simpson, then to be real, there isn’t much of the everyday blue-collar stuff here. “Gift Of Desperation” is as close as it gets, it attempts to enunciate some feelings, but really, who needs them?
It’s centrepiece, its masterpiece, really is the utterly glorious “Seventy’s Too Young For Lemmy To Die”. Like “Johnny B Goode” on speed, its bastardized Chuck Berry groove is a fitting homage.
“It’s Fashionable” has the best use of a “whoa-whoa” hook this side of The Wildhearts’ “Vanilla Radio” and the same sort of devil may care attitude permeates.
“It’s A Shame” chugs along with more lip-curl and attitude than many bands manage in a career, and special mention here for the rhythm section of Thor DSR on drums and Neil D Young on bass for. urmmm, keeping up and rockin’ in the free world quite like this.
“….Shame” ends with a primal scream, but “Trying To Kill Me” pogos along like The Ramones and isn’t backing down, while for all the fact its less than two minutes long then “Zoey” is the catchiest thing here, and if you aren’t singing the chorus by the end, then you might well be dead, in honesty.
There’s even two instrumentals. “Blundertoe” is what it would sound like if Hank Marvin did crystal meth with Hunter S Thompson in the desert, while “Surfin’ Swami” is exactly what surf rock should be.
“Anybody Wanna Skate” is the sound of men who should know better, refusing to grow up. And that is just fine. The audio equivalent of a leopard skin glitter cannon, this has more fizz than an industrial sized vat of sherbet dip.
Rating 8.5/10
