Uh huh. They're back. Spit, sass, swagger and swirl, the Avatars , Ann Arbor, Michigan's bad-ass garage quintet may carry the torch for a rock roll music that has been all but forgotten in the current pop age, but they use it to burn people into submission with. From the opening vamp in Honey Do (not the Beatles tune), it's so obvious that this band understands everything about their chosen mode of wild and wooly expression. But the Avatars aren't merely museum keepers, hell no. You Got Somethin' carries a bass rumble guitar scream worthy of the MC5 or the Sonic's Rendezvous Band, but it's turned inside out with the hooked-up-to-the-gods chorus, inverted two-chord Bo Diddley riff all ramped up to explode -- and it does in Mariah Cherem's voice; she thrives on the racket. A Chuck Berry riff that only existed in dreams before Never a Good Time opens the title track and breaks open the void for Cherem to grave her initials in the tree of the knowledge of good, evil, and rock roll. On the title cut, the hope of every girl group who wanted to rock up -- and out -- of Phil Spector 's Wall of Sound is realized in the chorus where guitar and bass throb and fight steadily with the drum kit to shatter niceness and sweetness and all the crap that took rock roll out of the gutter and put it in the museum. They get their revenge. In every song here, Cherem and her compatriots -- drummer Claudia Leo and bassist Theresa Kiefer, with sound-barrier splitting guitars from Chris Box Taylor and Charlie Lorenzi on ramped to its purple six strings -- wear rock roll's gloriously tattered and deafness-inducing banner and rip it up further. In There Was a Time and Hey Girls organs and pianos are rambling and clattering around the background somewhere, someplace, where one can hear Little Richard climbing down off his pulpit, shaking his hair around and beating the hell out of the piano. But this is in no manner "revival" music of any kind. There's nothing to dust off here. If anything, as these ten tunes blaze by the listener will be wondering and desperately looking for something to hang onto because in the grain of this outrageous, glorious music, all bets are off, all myths are exploded, and Greil Marcus' America is sneered at because it never existed. This is the music of the young and the old who still want to get off. For the Avatars, rock roll music is permissive, it's always explosive, it's always hedonistic, it's about freedom, imperfect love, perfect lust, vengeful anger, and two speeds; fast and faster, to the land where wishes, dreams and hopes collapse and turn into something better. For them, rock roll rides the rails into some unknown that can only be better than the one they just broke through. Produced by John Speck and engineered by Jim Diamond, Never a Good Time is a watermark, not only for the Avatars, but for anyone who understands that rock roll never went away, and didn't even hide; this album's the scrape to scratch for any band who actually has the guts to try to play it by no one's rules but their own. Amazing ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi

1		Honey Do
2		You Got Somethin'
3		Never a Good Time
4		There Was a Time
5		Revolution Revival
6		Wait
7		Hey Girls
8		Sooner or Later
9		Warm .44
10		Wonderin' Why

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