Kara Gordon & The Wreckage

Kara Gordon & The Wreckage

Triple A Records

I love this record. And what I love about it is that you feel – instantly – that the artist means it. That should be the case with any/all music, but listen to the radio, or buy a lazy cash-in/reunion album from your favourite band and you’ll be crushed by the time-wasting awfulness that infects the vast majority of music. My big issue, lately – in that it’s something I’ve just begun to understand as a real annoyance – is when people make music they can so easily/instantly walk away from. Party-rap and silly hip-hop antics are one obvious area where this happens. But the whole ironic rock/metal pastiche practice is something that really annoys me.

We get it Steel Panther and The Darkness and, erm, Tenacious D – you can play and you’re making a joke. I don’t like music that suggests the artist can walk away from it at any moment. Ween and Frank Zappa made plenty of great jokes. But the music stood up. And they stood by it.

There’s no joking around here though. Kara Gordon is a talented guitarist, well versed in rock and metal; he obeys the riff and chases after so many ideas in his blistering solos. He is relaying the Iron Maiden and Guns’n’Roses and Ozzy Osbourne material he grew up with. Hell, at one point he all but steals Deep Purple’s Burn but it’s in the Bad Poet’s Borrow/Good Poet’s Steal way – and this purloining power suggests a good guitar-poet.

Infectious rock riffing – check out The Judge.

Kara Gordon & The Wreckage, the debut self-titled album by Kara Gordon & The Wreckage has won me over; they (the band) have won me over because I believe this. I believe in it. I believe them. It’s music that makes me want to be an enthusiastic cheerleader, egging them on from the sidelines. There’s some dazzling guitar playing – and when there isn’t (the odd bumble into more pedestrian blues-rock territory) it’s still offered with enough charm and conviction to get over the line. Traces of what make the player, tiny musical footprints, are all over this album. And I like that.

I wish them all the best with this release. I’ve played it heaps. And I’ll play it a lot more from here on in. I hope to see the band live – this album gives enough of a tease and a taste and suggests very good things happen when this band hits the stage.