This is the album The Clash meant to make when they recorded "Cut The Crap". No messing... the Messiahs are ugly brutes who don't pansy around with pretty production techniques or shrinking pretensions of art – they have the primitive basics of rock music in sharp focus and they don't take any detours in delivering it. No frills here, just thrills.

There are many allusions to be drawn in their sparse ferocity... Talking Heads on 'Talking Doll', the Stones on 'Wild Blue Yonder', early Clash on 'Smash The Market Place', The Skids on 'Let's Go Down To The Woods', and the thread of modern urban blues binding the rest of it all together.

You don't need to interview them, you don't need to analyse, you just know... the Messiahs understand. They have a gut instinct for the roots of blues and R'n'B and from that sure base they can confidently blast their way through Bill Carter's extraordinarily powerful selection of songs.

Their most arrogant aggression as they pound through the numbingly percussive 'Talking Doll' is astonishing for a band of relative inexperience and there's a perversity about 'President Kennedy's Mile' and 'Clear View' that aligns them as much with oddball American bands like SWANS as with the more obvious R'n'B tradition.

The final track, the truly momentous 'Killer Born Man' even recalls The Fall as Carter hoarsely chokes his way through a veritable barrage of garbled imagery while the rhythm pounds menacingly on. There's something very exciting about a three-piece band with their hackles up and 'Gun-Shy' doesn't even knock at the door before it boots its way into your living room.

With the writing clearly on the wall for the pin-up bands, it needs an album as strong as this to explode the current lethargy of pop music. 'Wild Blue Yonder' and 'Just For Fun' should be enough to jolt some heads, while the true grit of 'Twin Cadillac Valentine' and 'Killer Born Man' on side two should really drop them for the full count.

A great album
b

Rhythm and blues with a punk snottiness? Sounds great. Bald white Bo-Diddleyisms? Meet Bill Carter, guitarist and singer for Screaming Blue Messiahs.

Comparisons for this English band have ranged from Dr Feelgood to The Clash and, naturally, I have a few of my own. SBM aren't as boozey and bluesy as a pub rock band is expected to be, nor does it write and perform at the larger-than-life scale The Clash operated on. They fall in line with such mid-to-late '70s bands as The Stranglers (Carter has Hugh Cornwell's sneering demeanor), 999 or The Members. Hard hitting, trim and fit rock and roll energy.
b

The cover of The Screaming Blue Messiahs' first mini-album/EP 'Good And Gone' captures their music perfectly: a posse of WW2 Grumman fighters cruising above the clouds, sleek, swift beasts on the warpath, looking to swoop down out of the sky and devastate. I hadn't realised, until I heard 'Gun-Shy', just how very sleek they've become. The sound on this LP is more compressed, less raucously aggressive than on their earlier records; it's been chopped and channelled to a more streamlined form, a real low rider that looks as good as it moves. On the strength of this album, I'd say the Messiahs are going to be very, very big indeed.

Like ZZ Top, they've learnt their disco lessons well: the majority of the tracks on 'Gun-Shy' chug along at an eminently danceable array of beats per minute, which, allied to their power-trio line-up, successfully duplicates the Texan boogie baron's hit formula. In place of ZZ Top's tumbleweed wit and irony, however, they have a kind of refined anger that's peculiarly post-punk British; they may lack the long beards, too, but singer/guitarist Bill Carter substitutes the Brit equivalent, a shiny shiny pate.

'Smash The Market Place' is the most overt, straightforwardly angry of the songs on offer here. It's where Carter's annoyance most closely approaches that of 'Mad' Joe Strummer, both in terms of subject matter – dig that great rock-dogma title, the envy of even an X-Moore! – and vocal styling, here hoarse and unrefined.

Carter's lyrical concerns can be quite bewildering. "Suck on that dummy, you holiday head / It must be something you ate", he snarls on 'Holiday Head'. The major part of the LP's like that, a diffuse array of discontent spread over ten tracks, culminating in the semi-hard-rock-rap of 'Killer Born Man', a summation of sorts which contains lines as cryptic as "I'm not going to make like Buckminster Fuller". In what way, one wonders? Like Lydon's PiL and Fier's Golden Palominos, there's a reclamation of hard rock going on here, a picking up of the thread that got woven into heavy-metal penile dementia a couple of decades back. More than those two outfits, however, Bill Carter exemplifies the changing role of the guitar in the heavy-rock power-trio format: no longer do we have the solo tour-de-force of a Clapton or Hendrix, which paved the way, ultimately, for HM; today's six-string virtuoso, courtesy improved studio technology, must fulfil, as Carter does here, a variety of textural and ambient functions, as well as provide the instrumental focus. In this respect, he's aided immeasurably by the ability of both drummer Kenny Harris and bassist Chris Thompson to move into any aural space left temporarily vacant, as when the former launches into double-time drums on the mighty, rolling 'Twin Cadillac Valentine'.

In a year in which the goods are coming mainly from overseas – PiL, Palominos, Prince, Chills – The Screaming Blue Messiahs have produced one of the greater British offerings. They've swapped the bludgeon for the stiletto, and they're cutting up a treat. Just watch 'em fly!
b

All this guitar dementia makes it hard to decipher Carter's lyrics, but his six strings speak volumes about the Screaming Blue Messiahs' fighting spirit. Even in "Let's Go Down to the Woods," when he sings, "Let's go down to the woods and pray/Pray, pray for a brighter day," Carter makes it plain with his sunburst chords and the sarcastic cluck of his rhythm guitar that nothing gets done on bended knee. And Gun-Shy is just the thing to get you on your feet.
b

Messiahs: Good Ol' Guitarwork

For all the talk these days about synthesisers, digital samplers and all the other electronic musical marvels, it's still hard to top an electric guitar as the essential rock instrument. Even in Britain, where the pop market often seems hopelessly in thrall to novelty, the guitar remains bottom line for most bands.

The Screaming Blue Messiahs, in fact, seem virtually all guitar. Sure, there's enough drum and bass behind this power trio to give 'Gun-Shy', the band's American debut, plenty of dancefloor punch. But it's Bill Carter's guitarwork that sets the tone and dominates the sound. Carter is basically a rhythm player, not a soloist, and he employs a big, beefy sound reminiscent of Belefegore or Killing Joke. But where the others rely on a stripped-down new wave approach to rhythm guitar, Carter has a taste for rock classics, sneaking country flourishes into 'Twin Cadillac Valentine' and underscoring 'Smash The Market Place' with stinging Bo Diddley licks.
b