ALBUM REVIEWS: HOCKEY and BUCKCHERRY
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Hockey
Mind Chaos
Virgin Records
★★★★☆
This Portland quartet's album is a remarkably confident and competent affair for a debut. Opening gambit Too Fake blinks, bleeps and bloops awake before exploding in a riot of guitars, funky struts and dancefloor-friendly grooves that's impossible not to like. It's a symptom of the colour and flashes of fishhook-like brilliance that crop up throughout an album that's gloriously hard to pin down, hop-scotching away as it does through hip-hop, garage rock and electro. That the sparkling soul, chunky beats, pop nous and dancefloor directness doesn't smack of gimmickry is key, helped along by Ben Grubin's lively, rubber-band vocals and some witty lyrical turns that make this chaos great.
Buckcherry
15/Black Butterfly
Eleven Seven Records
★★★☆☆
This double-album deluxe edition, which gathers together 2006's Grammy-nominated album and its follow-up, also dangles a third disc of live and demo tracks to suck in any rockers sitting on the leather-clad, metal studded fence. But at a paltry five tracks from this rock behemoth, it's hardly worth getting frothy-mouthed over. Buckcherry are a resolutely meat-and-potatoes American hard rock band - there's a "Nah-nah-nah" moment and brutally quick, squealing guitar solo within the first two minutes of 15's opener So Far. There's nothing wrong with that, or the obligatory 'heartfelt' slowie here and there, like 15's Sorry and BB's Rose, but there's far more exciting hard rock alternatives out there.
- STEPHEN MOORE
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