Dark Side

The Bugs were a U.K. garage rock revival band who seemingly existed just long enough to make one album, 1987's Darkside, and then vanish. While this is something less than a tragedy, a listen to Darkside (which rather unexpectedly was reissued on CD in 2006) proves this band was significantly better than the average European garage-pysch merchants of the era. The disc's sleeve features no credits, and Ace/Big Beat play coy about the group's membership in their bio, which means this may or may not be some semi-supergroup of '60s-obsessed U.K. rockers, but whoever these folks were, they bring the fuzztone energy with plenty of style and an impressive reserve of energy. Darkside is full of guitars stalking a netherworld between fuzz and jangle while diving in and out of a deep sea of echo and reverb, with the singer matching the six-string chaos with glorious howling and full-bodied vocal mania — most bands chose sides between psychedelic madness and garage noise worship, but the Bugs clearly had no problem embracing both with equal fervor. While many of the songs seem to have been stitched together from clichés common to both genres, the band generates enough heat that it doesn't much matter after a while, and "It's About Time," "Six String Goddess," "Took a Long Time" and "Bad Dream" are good enough to bring a loving sneer to the lips of any Nehru-clad hipster. It would be nice to know who the Bugs were and what they've been up to, but at least we have Darkside to show they didn't mess up their sole opportunity in the recording studio.