Finland’s Electric Blue Peggy Sue and the Revolutionions from Mars may not be big on evolution(ion) but, if you got it, why change it? What Peggy Sue’s got is a big, hard, all-dark-meat sound with lots of grit and grimy gristle. Lead vocalist Ray Katz has a voice that sounds like he drinks Drano for breakfast and washes it down with lighter fluid, tossing in the lighter for good measure. His voice grumbles and growls out the band’s English-language lyrics with cackled and shrieked high-pitched edges. (Chris D of the Flesh Eaters is a fair comparison, but so is the Wicked Witch of the West.)
The 10-inch Revolutionion (named for the Beatles song, but that’s the extent of that band’s role here) contains short, hard tracks of post-Stoogescore (plus a similarly treated cover of Alan Vega’s “Speedway”) delivered grunge first, with Farfisa and a Seedsy ’60s sensibility filtered through ’70s punk experience.
The band’s formula (as well as the specific source of its LP titles) remains the same through Evolutionion and Destruction, both of which rock as hard as a cement wall.
By Music for McDonald’s though, change is afoot. Adding horns and other new instruments to the previous sonic package, the album has a Fast Side which preserves the group’s old perspective and a Food Side, where anything goes. “The Amazing Chronicle of Josef’s Family” slinks cat-like at its opening, tough and measured, with tantalizingly tangoesque hesitation. It whispers and pauses and hides, then reveals a swelling, almost traditional pop song in its midst, only to degenerate in a glorious sea of barking half-speed vocals, backward trackings and studio babble before the hard, smooth nugget of the song makes its return. Having stopped referencing the Beatles in titles, Electric Blue Peggy Sue has begun to reflect their influence in the grooves.