perfidy

It's hard to say anything good about a good hamburger.

Wait... what?

Although burgers in general are common as dirt in this great land of ours, and many do deserve our scorn or pity, a really good hamburger is a beautiful thing. And although you can get a really good burger at an upscale restaurant (and one place not far from where I'm sitting gives you eight ounces of Black Angus on a homemade roll with duck foie gras terrine on peppered brioche with a side of pommes fritz), that's totally beside the point. Absolutely delicious, but beside the point. A good burger, a really g-d d-mn good burger comes from the dim and divey bar down the street with the fanatical cook and it costs like four bucks and that plus a beer will make your day and your damn week even. But all you'll ever say about that place if anybody asks, even as you think about how the meat is perfect with a nice char and pink in the middle and how there's not too much bun and how the juice and ketchup run down your hand until you lick it off and how time stands still for you while you down it ravenously, is, "...good burger."

It's also hard to say anything good about a good rock band. What can you say by way of praise that gets the message across? Take The Black Halos, a quintet out of Vancouver whose sixth full-length, Alive Without Control crossed my desk a little while back. I like the record, I like it a whole bunch, but I have been at a loss as to what to say about them that isn't hacky and derivative.

The fact is, the band are very up-front about the very issue that's giving me fits: they unapologetically sound a whole lot like the Dead Boys, the Dolls, the Stooges, the Dictators and maybe the Replacements. And there it is, right there. The whole review. You know if you like trashy street-punk. You know what that sounds like. And if I tell you that Alive Without Control is the very best such album I've heard in a long, long, loooong time, would that help convince you to give it a spin? 'Cos that's all I can do.

Alive Without Control hits all the right buttons. Singer Billy Hopeless has a Stiv Bators yowl that wraps perfectly around the band's noisy punk attack on burners like "Three Sheets To The Wind" and a very fine and ragged cover of Tom Petty's "I Need To Know." The guitars are loud and crunchy and play off each other just the way a five-piece should, and guitarist Adam Becvare even took over Stiv Bators' role in Lords of the New Church after Stiv went to the great gig in the sky (how's that for cred?). Even the slowest number, "Mirrorman," hits like Tyson as the band dig into a grinding speed-dirge that somehow straddles middle land between the Dead Boys and vintage... Aerosmith?

What can I say? The Black Halos don't try to do anything more than make traditional sleaze-punk that lives up to their idols. Every note's perfect, the songs are great, and the lyrics are punk as hell. The Black Halos bring it old school in every possible way. I could be twenty again, and I could be drunk on Penn Pilsner and rye in a white t-shirt and leather jacket smoking Winstons and looking for a fight or a date at the 31st Street Pub back in Pittsburgh, and the band up there on that perfect night in the Iron City in my smoky, sepia-toned memory could be the Black Halos.

That's a damn good burger.