{"id":945,"date":"2007-10-25T22:57:10","date_gmt":"2007-10-26T02:57:10","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-10-25T23:49:05","modified_gmt":"2007-10-25T23:49:05","slug":"fire-for-hire-supagroup-s-ongoing-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/fire-for-hire-supagroup-s-ongoing-effort\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire for Hire:  Supagroup&#8217;s Ongoing Crusade to Kick the World&#8217;s Ass"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"image_block\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/media\/blogs\/rth\/fire.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"435\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"image_legend\">Supagroup: a gentle, sensitive quartet of American troubadors<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Cheap Trick with bigger balls.  Aerosmith without any Tyler-ian pretension or bullshit power balladry.  Motley Crue, if they weren&#8217;t completely retarded and didn&#8217;t suck.  And, yes, a whole lot of vintage 1976 AC\/DC, played with the same kind of the-world-could-end-any-second-now urgency.  You can probably understand why I love this Supagroup band so much.<\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WGtmIwY2fpU?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>About a month ago, Supagroup dropped their latest white phosphorus fire-bomb of an album, this time called &#8220;Fire for Hire,&#8221; and I snatched it up as quickly as I could, remembering just how fucking *hot* their last el-pee, &#8220;Rules,&#8221; had been.  &#8220;Fire&#8230;&#8221; is a wee bit patchier, but still packs a brass-knucks punch that puts most other bands to shame.  The el-pee&#8217;s opening salvo alone is worth more than the price of admission.  Seriously, at the risk of sounding like a complete fan-boy doofus, it&#8217;s been a *very* long time since I bought an album that comes charging out of the gates like this one does.  The song behind the video I&#8217;ve posted above is track one.  From this point to track&#8230; uh&#8230; six, this album is fucking unstoppable, skull-crushing, brilliant.  I meant to post the three tracks that follow &#8220;What&#8217;s Your Problem Now?&#8221; to prove my point, but RTH seems to be acting up again, and you should just buy the album anyway.  <\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s the good news.  This is real fist-pumping, head-banging, rump-shaking American rock and fucking roll, played with a seemingly near-desperate honesty and earnestness.  Jolly good!  The bad news is *not* that the riffs and general boogie-rock party vibe are completely derivative. (Who cares, and what isn&#8217;t?)  It&#8217;s not even that many of the lyrics &#8212; when they&#8217;re not about getting fucked up and fighting for the glory of Rock &#8212; are about screwing underage chicks and getting your knob polished before they throw your sorry ass in jail.  No, the bad news is that I&#8217;m 43 years old, and I love this stuff anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Understand that I don&#8217;t love it for the same post-ironic reasons that many rock critic types seem to.  See, I just don&#8217;t think Supagroup is kidding.  I really think they *believe* &#8212; or that they *want* to believe &#8212; when they write things like:<\/p>\n<p>So get yourself some drumsticks<br \/>\nBuy an old guitar<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s time to take up arms, my friend,<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s a rockolutionary war<\/p>\n<p>This is a flag under which I&#8217;m prepared to march.  Rock and roll is *real*, my friends.  Like the rest of you, I hope, I&#8217;ve been to the rock mountaintop, and I&#8217;ve seen how small and simple the world looks from up there.  The air may be thin, but it&#8217;s one of the few places where it&#8217;s crystal-clear.  It&#8217;s a high &#8212; and why shouldn&#8217;t Supagroup, and Hrrundi V. Bakshi, and the rest of you, want to live there?  For Supagroup, rock and roll might be a crackpipe, but, hey, it won&#8217;t rot your teeth or shrivel your balls.  Pass me the torch!<\/p>\n<p>So, yes, I&#8217;m turning a blind eye to the stupider, rock-as-giant-hard-on aspects of the Supagroup message &#8212; and I&#8217;m not dwelling on the fact that there&#8217;s one dick-wilting track on this new album that&#8217;s just a floppy leather hat and a holstered 12-string acoustic away from sounding like Bon Jovi.  The album basically kicks major ass, and this is is one of those cases where suspension of rock cynicism is fully warranted.  Long live Supagroup, and (almost) everything they stand for.<\/p>\n<p>HVB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Supagroup: a gentle, sensitive quartet of American troubadors Cheap Trick with bigger balls. Aerosmith without any Tyler-ian pretension or bullshit power balladry. Motley Crue, if they weren&#8217;t completely retarded and didn&#8217;t suck. And, yes, a whole lot of vintage 1976 AC\/DC, played with the same kind of the-world-could-end-any-second-now urgency. You can probably understand why I <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/fire-for-hire-supagroup-s-ongoing-effort\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}