Thirteen Off My Hook

A companion piece with Dead Moon Night (also released in 1990), Thirteen Off My Hook is a compilation put together by Dead Moon's Fred Cole from several albums and limited-run singles the band released on its own Tombstone Records imprint between 1998 and 1990. Cole has been making great rock & roll records since 1964, but Dead Moon demonstrate that the man's music has only grown more aggressive and emotionally powerful with the passage of time, and these 12 songs are muscular, stripped-to-the-bone garage punk informed by blues and hard rock at their most elemental (and least pretentious). Recorded and mixed in mono at the band's primitive home studio, Dead Moon sound simple but remarkably powerful here, with Fred's wildly emotive vocals and razor-wire guitar matched by the throbbing bass runs of Toody Cole (his spouse) and the breakneck drumming of Andrew Loomis, and relatively slow numbers like "Streets of Despair" sound just as aggressive as chargers like "Revenge." There's a "tear down and start again" attitude to much of Dead Moon's music, but coming from people who built their own houses with their own hands, these songs come off not like trendy nihilism but as the honest expression of folks who have made a willful decision not to conform, and Thirteen Off My Hook is a powerful exercise in no-quarter rock & roll.