Coming across like a downtown New York version of
the Hives minus the carefully manicured public image,
Some Action make their full-length debut with the 34-minute garage punk blast of the excellently titled
The Band That Sucked the Life Out of Rock 'n Roll and Killed Itself in the Process. As long as this quartet keeps things short and simple, the results are dead-on three-chord rock & roll played with just enough pop smarts to keep the tunes from disappearing into an undifferentiated ramalama blur. Tunes like "Don't You Look" and "Done with You" make up for their near-total lack of originality (from the straight-outta-Nuggets titles to
Ian Magee's bored-teenager drawl) with a real spark of conviction. It's on the longer tunes like the bloozy "What's It Gonna Take" and the sub-
MC5 "STAB" that
Some Action lose the plot, but luckily there's only a handful of those. Fully two-thirds of
The Band That Sucked the Life Out of Rock 'n Roll and Killed Itself in the Process is outstanding garage punk, which is just about enough to make it worth hearing.