Music Review // Juniper Avenue "Chuck Rock"

Listen on Bandcamp here.

The sound of Juniper Avenue starts off fast and hard.  Through the album "Chuck Rock" it rarely lets up and if anything just seems to grow more powerful and louder by the end.  Artists such as The Kinks and Joan Jett come to mind right away, on the first song "Everything Must Go".  It's such a great lead off song for the album because it really pulls you in and right away you can tell whether you're going to be into this one or not.

With big guitar riffs and super-charged feeling rock n roll, The Vines and even The Hives come to mind as well.  I hear some Franz Ferdinand in here though by "Self and Pity Doubt" it becomes a little bit dreamy as well.   By the end of "Miss Shine" though there is a sense of metal, as it grows wilder, and listening to this album back more than once just has that undertone of metal feeling lingering.

"Tyrant Song" comes out a bit gritty and "Danny Fanatic" is heavy on the bass line, but this has elements of both punk rock and metal in it while overall maintaining this feeling of rock n roll, which can even flashback to the classics at times.  Few bands that I have ever heard have been able to do this on this level, but one of them was Sprung Monkey, who released "Situation Life" back in 1993.

The fact that I can't really think of an artist who has sounded like this since an album from thirty years ago just really speaks volumes about Juniper Avenue.   In some ways these are the perfect songs for skateboarding as the music blends punk rock flawlessly with Black Sabbath.   This is just one of those sounds I don't feel like a lot of artists attempt because it is not easy to do, but Juniper Avenue does make it look easy here.