BAD LIEUTENANTS - EVERYTIME I COME AROUND
by Ginger Coyote

 

 

This album is rated NC-17, kids. This is not your big sister’s tear-jerker straightedge band.

The Bad Lieutenants play punk-infused arena rock like retarded hillbillies. “They brought us out of the swamps. They stuck us in the cities. It was overload. Temptations were everywhere. What did they think was gonna happen? Giving in was too much fun.”

Take the sounds of today’s bands like The Staggers and The Dwarves and mix them with elements of Motorhead, The Stooges, AC/DC and Johnny Thunders and you’ve got “Every Time I Come Around”, a debut that was a decade in the making and cost much more than the studio time. The album is a descent into a world where personal demons are ignored for the amusement of crude jokes and the power of instant gratification.

The Bad Lieutenants are a later incarnation of Connecticut’s greatest unknown punk rock band: The Chinks. First powered up in the mid 90’s, the Chinks went down in a ball of substance-induced flames in less than three years. Their impact was on few, but it was lasting. By 1998 Steve Theriault, the song-writing force behind the force, found himself serving time and re-habbing cold turkey in one of the state’s maximum security facilities. Redemption and salvation don’t come cheap. Songs like “Christmas Time Bomb”, “Friends and Family”, “Police Truck”, and several other never-recorded tracks all tackle the very high cost of finding a path out of despair. Yet most of the songs revel in the glory and freedom of never compromising with a square’s life. Leave the straight and narrow to the straight and narrow.

“Midnight Beefcake”, the last song on the album, is the last recording of Steve Theriault playing lead guitar. Until his next time around, the fireworks contained in this two-minute slaughterhouse will have to sustain ya!

www.myspace.com/badlietenants