The Bones – Monkeys With Guns
The Bones – Monkeys With Guns CD (People Like You)
Raise your hand if you are not familiar with The Bones. If your hand is in the air, it sucks to be you. But wait… The Impaler is here to help! And it’s easy. Painless. Visit www.bonesrocknroll.com or the People Like You Records website or Amazon or iTunes or wherever it is you like to buy music to support independent artists. Buy some records by The Bones. That’s it. Quick. Simple. No tears. Why, you may be asking yourselves, should we do this? Because The Impaler says so? Well, while that actually is a very good reason, let’s go ahead and say ‘no’ for now. Let me give you some reasons. The Bones play rock ‘n’ roll. More specifically, The Bones play RAWK ‘N’ ROLL. The Bones are from Sweden – and we all know that Swedish bands rock. It’s an inevitability of life that The Impaler has come to accept, and I suggest that you do too. The Bones have been tearing up stages around the world since 1996. Every one of their albums is bad-ass. The Bones play raucous, rowdy, catchy-as-hell rawk that is equal parts big-riff rock, street punk, and melodic glam punk. How about a few references to get you in the right frame of mind? New York Dolls, Backyard Babies, Black Halos, The Hellacopters, Born To Lose, US Bombs, Lower Class Brats, Cock Sparrer, The Wildhearts. Add an undeniably direct KISS influence for good measure. Get it? Find the band’s ‘Burnout Boulevard’ record and give ‘Straight Flush Ghetto’ a spin or two (or sixty). Make more sense now?! It damn well should. So now that the newbies are prepped, let’s get everyone back into the same room and start over. Is everyone familiar with The Bones? Hell yeah! Of course you are! Did you know that they have a new album – ‘Monkeys With Guns’ – out now on People Like You? You do now! And this one just might be the band’s biggest, nastiest offering to date. From the opening moments of ‘Bones City Rollers’ – when a cassette can be heard being inserted into a vintage snap-case player and ‘those’ melodic vocals kick in – to the closing moments of ‘This Hound Dog Rocks’ – when the chorus is echoed by horns until fade-out and the cassette can be heard clicking to a stop and being ejected (brilliant!) – this album rocks. Rawks. It rolls, too. Tracks like ‘Shooting Blanks’, ‘Concrete Cowboys’, ‘Dead Heart Beats’, ‘Die Like A Man’, and ‘One Louder’ were forged in a fire of pure adrenaline, filled with rumbling bass, massive riffs, hotshot solos, and the thickest, sickest, coolest piled-on gang vocals ever committed to tape. I’ve had ‘Monkeys With Guns’ for over two months now and if it were possible to wear a groove into a digital file in the fashion of wearing a groove into a slab o’ vinyl, I’d already be in the market for a second copy. I can’t stop spinning this record, and it’s taking every bit of self-control I can muster to sit still long enough to actually write these words when I want to be on my feet, letting the music move me. The Bones. ‘Monkeys With Guns’. Seriously. The Impaler @impalerspeaks
