CD Review - The Len Price 3 - Pictures

So Hybrid Magazine's put up another one of my CD Reviews, and I thought I'd share it with you guys here. Frankly, the review probably undersells the CD, which is bloody brilliant. Of course, the full length CD doesn't hit the streets until January 10th, but whatev.



The Len Price 3
Pictures
Wicked Cool Records



The Len Price 3 – “Pictures”

England’s Medway Delta region has long contributed a steady stream of excellent, yet under-appreciated, garage rock and power pop bands, going back at least as far as Billy Childish’s earliest works, through to the present day. A good number of these acts over the years, from Thee Milkshakes, through The Prisoners, to The Bresslaws, often go unnoticed beyond the area’s working class pubs or the occasional hard core garage rock aficionados. With the release of The Len Price 3’s latest full-length, “Pictures”, there is now yet another opportunity for the broader audience to move beyond the past and revel in the underground legend that is the Medway sound.

In line with their previous work, The Len Price 3 (in which there is no one in the band named Len Price, naturally), the band once again paints a masterful canvas using a palette of colors appropriated from freakbeat, mod, and traditional power pop song structures, and borrows somewhat liberally from the same type of working class lyrical ideas typical of Ray Davies. The sound is big and jagged, with boomy toms, crackly snares, alternately jangly or fuzzy Rickenbacker guitars, effective harmonies, and enough ferocity behind the pop façade to hint at the frustration of one’s station, while never forgetting that rock and roll is still about fun.

The thirteen tracks that comprise “Pictures”’ clock in at barely more than 30 minutes, and most individual tracks are here and gone in under two and a half minutes. Within this idiom there is really no need for anything more. Get in, get out, quit fuckin’ about. The album’s opening eponymous track punches brightly with a meld of Mick Jones-spittled verses and a chorus that is very reminiscent of early Who, circa “Circles”, and provides a worth launching pad for the record. Additional highlights include “Keep Your Eyes On Me”, “Mr. Grey”, “Jack in the Green”, and the Daviesesque “If You Live Round Here”, the latter replete with cautions against pretentiousness and warnings to know your role:

You think you’re better than the population

Don’t get ideas so above your station

You’re gonna have to lump it, baby if you live round here

You say you’ve had an education

Round here, boy, that’s an affectation

You’re gonna have to lump it, baby if you live round here

“Pictures” is one of the more enjoyably buoyant and fresh-sounding pop albums to come out during this year. While much of the credit certainly goes to the boys in the band, a nod is due in the direction of Graham Day, one of the most enduring purveyors of the Medway sound from his founding of The Prisoners through today, and one of the producers of “Pictures”. In fact, much of the record bears his unmistakable hand. Other tracks on the album hearken back to the poppier side of bands such as The Easybeats or The Small Faces, particularly “Jack in the Green” and closer “The Great Omani”. As a whole, the record is a triumph.

As with many of their Medway contemporaries, The Len Price 3 do not seem to be interested in expanding the boundaries of popular music, or breaking any new ground. Rather, the band seems to be intent on simply making the most riveting and entertaining music they possibly can while remaining true to the very essence of their creation. To that end, “Pictures” meets the demands of that mission in spades. Perhaps this will be the record to break through to the masses that have heretofore missed out on one of the most vital subsets of rock and roll.