Charged by Nebula

I guess the new "rock underground"?you know, the one LeeKing and Richardson are always writing about?is for real. Bands like the Hellacopters and Gluecifer are doing an update on the piston-pumping Detroit assault; Nashville Pussy and Honky are riding the redneck stomp and reintroducing cowboy hats to the vernacular; the Black Halos are flamboyantly falling face first into the drunken gutter like the original glam-punkers. Meanwhile there are hundreds of hairy-headed swamp/scuzz rockers walkin' round in any town now? It's just like the early 70s. These are the "rock" fans, and they constitute an increasingly visible entity?their movement intersects with a variety of other musical styles as well, but what they really represent is a basic adherence to the lifelong ethos of rock: they have long hair, they do drugs and they form bands and hit the road.

These guys consciously see themselves in that tradition, too. The other night I was talking to a couple of dudes who were members of a local swamp-rock band, and they were drunkenly singing the praises of Sir Lord Baltimore, and ain't that a kick? Who would've thought there'd be any legacy for that kind of thing, the first wave of heavy metal? The rock fans are establishing a canon; it's one that doesn't include Elton John but does include Mötorhead, etc. It's the anti-"classic rock"?what I call the real history of rock.

In this latter category, Nebula is king. As this new album proves, their deity-like stature within the movement is justified. Charged is quite simply an ass-kicker all the way throughout?a desperate-sounding caterwaul that combines the jet-fueled pace of Raw Power with the swampy depths of Blue Cheer and the best grunge bands. Recording for Sub Pop?who are more or less the catalysts of the movement in postmodern terms?Nebula are of course no strangers to the swamps. On this album, the bluesy riffs may be simplistic, but the level of intensity is primal and the band is totally "together" on even their looser extrapolations. As far as post-everything stoner blues goes, Charged might be the overachieving pinnacle of the genre (that includes even Monster Magnet's experiments).

The opening stompdown, "Do It Now," is Hellacopterean anthem-rock that literally explodes out of the box. They pay homage to "Train Kept a-Rollin'," which is surely their right, being descendants of the same tradition. "Beyond" starts out with a Blue Cheer intro before stampeding into a neatly carved heavy metal riff a la ZZ Top. As I've been saying for a long time, the rock fans of this new generation look back at all manifestations of aggressive hard rock?60s, 70s, 80s?as punk-by-proxy just by dint of it having guitars (an anomaly in the digitized Britney Spears era). That's why legitimate "hard rock" bands nowadays acknowledge the influence of both Kiss and the New York Dolls. That's the tradition Nebula falls into, with a lot of West Coast "stoner" attitude thrown in. But Nebula's coming at it from the megalomaniacal hallucinations of Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and Monster Magnet, as opposed to the tripping-on-my-own-shoelaces splat of Nirvana and Love Battery.

"Travelin' Man's Blues" could be a riff off an old Jethro Tull album. "Instant Gravitation" shows their acute riff marksmanship once more, and places their music firmly in the tradition of such other savage power trios as Mountain (and way better than Grand Funk). "This One" starts with the riff from David Bowie's "Janine" before submerging into more kozmik blues. "Ignition," true to its name, is a spark plug of, once again, Hellacopters proportions, with some seedy space wank thrown in. "Shaker" is more Blue Cheer. "Goodbye Yesterday" starts out with some Led Zep acoustic-strum as the band angles through their usual revo-rhetoric before bursting into another blues hump. There's a Stooges quality to this one also that marks it as an ass-busting classic.

But the best cut is the grand finale, the aptly titled "All the Way," which is a thunderstruck swampfest of Sabbathean proportions?a fitting end to this nonstop hell ride. Let it burn.