Awesome Color: Electric Aborigines

It's predictable and kind of sad that every new

rock band with a sludgy, prowling, blues-based sound gets compared to The

Stooges. Awesome Color is just such a group—and sure enough, its

self-titled debut was overwhelmingly labeled and dismissed as a Stooges knock-off.

What really hampered the disc wasn't unoriginality—as if that even

mattered—but a hesitance that came from the trio's relative youth and

inexperience. Awesome Color's sophomore effort, Electric Aborigines, has outgrown that

greenness; in its place teems a lush, tangled mass of rock 'n' roll. Granted,

it's an orchard full of poison and thorns: "Come And Dance" drips and slithers

with lascivious menace, and "Outside Tonight" spares no jagged edge in its

quest to dissect itself. All of Awesome Color's cracks have been

spackled with echoes, organs, and swirls of diseased paisley, evoking the pulse

and haze of everyone from The Scientists to Hawkwind to Sound Of Confusion-era Spacemen 3. "Sayin'

it, that's one thing / Doin' it, yeah, that's another thing," snarls guitarist

Derek Stanton on the bruised-to-bursting "Step Up." And throughout Aborigines, Awesome Color has

followed its own suddenly sage advice.