Seeing as how lawnmower guitars mulching up teeny-bop happy-pop is all the
rage in the wake of New Age punk morphing into the New Wave re-runs, can S.A.’s
Big Drag remain indie much longer? Not if their recent Sleep King four-song
EP is any indication. Only Freddie Cannon’s classy-chassis driven “Tallahassee
Lassie” is from their recent Only Boy CD, and you wouldn’t want to miss
the instrumental “Big Drag Theme” or “She Drives Me Crazy.” Miss I almost did a
New Bomb Turks 45, printed up right here in Austin at Rise. Neither “My
Hopes are Copacetic” nor “Sexual Dreaming” were on these Ohities’
Information Highway Revisited smoker, and while both songs sound a
little thin in the production department, you will want them after the band
gets signed, rich, and bored. Anything but boring are the now ex-Crown
Roast, whose new Unclean single is a three-songer of typically glowering,
and heavy distortion madness – particularly the gleefully unlistenable “Enemy.”
Much cleaner, and neater is the yellow vinyl “minimalist rockabilly pop” of
Million Sellers, whose four-songer is a dust-kicking slice of the
Continental Club as good as Austin can produce. And speaking of the
Continental, their recent summer residents Action Slax have a pic-disc out on
Kozik’s Man’s Ruin under their other name The Useless Playboys, which
finds the band up to their no-good Nineties Sinatra lounging, which is of
course the flipside to that lawnmowing Green Day stuff. Oh, those kids! –
Raoul Hernandez
“7 and 7 is” reviews local and national 7″ singles. Send to: “7 and
7 is,” The Austin Chronicle, PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.
This article appears in September 1 • 1995 and September 1 • 1995 (Cover).