Simply put,
Davie Allan is one of California's true guitar legends and for over 30 years, along withthe Arrows has earned his King Of Fuzz title. He and the Arrows put forth a kind of wrangling jagged-edge brand of psychedelic buzz and howl rock, that combines
Dick Dale's roaring surf strut with
Link Wray's raw-edged expressionism, all filtered through a gloriously warped prism of biker sensibility and lysergic, freak out texture. This is the kind of music that
Guitar Wolf longs to play but doesn't have the chops or cojones to approach, let alone master. This is L.A. punk before the nihilism and the mohawks and the vocals turned it nto something else for another generation. This music is street tough, in your face, rail and roll of the highest order. Allan & the Arrows take no prisoners on Restless in L.A. Their attack is woolly, fierce, and completely on the overdriven side of a Dodge Barracuda outfitted with a 484 fuel-injected hemi screaming down Sunset Strip. The 14 cuts that adorn the album range from the highly torqued instrumentals that line power chords and single-string legato runs such as "The Toxic Terror" and "Kick Back" to a smoking cover of
the Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" to the midtempo wrangler "The Loud, the Loose and the Savage," which may draw its inspiration from
Morricone's spaghetti Western themes but is all
Allan rock & roll in projection. Other tracks that stand out include the appropriately monikered "Energizer," with its guitar-slinging riffs, and a redone version of "Theme from 'The Wild Angels'" from the soundtrack of the 1967 movie of the same name -- which originally starred Peter Fonda and
Nancy Sinatra. There is no slack on Restless in L.A., as the whammy-bar orgy of the title track suggests. This is simply one of best guitar rock records of the last decade. ~ Thom Jurek