Nothing Can Stop These Men

In addition to helming a myriad of bands (including The Milkshakes, Pop Rivets, and Thee Headcoats), Billy Childish has distinguished himself as a poet, novelist, and painter, and he maintains a fiercely independent, unrepentantly scornful attitude toward art establishments of all stripes. The Milkshakes formed at the dawn of the ‘80s and were the first of Childish’s bands to adopt the raw, R&B-worshipping aesthetic that cribbed from the more avowedly primitive exponents of the British Invasion, like The Downliners Sect and The Pretty Things. Childish would doggedly mine this vein for the rest of his musical career to uniformly excellent results, but Milkshakes releases like Nothing Can Stop These Men have an incendiary immediacy that's missing from some of Childish’s more recent efforts. The sixth in an improbably long run of near-perfect Milkshakes albums, Nothing Can Stop These Men fairly burns with energy, from the Link Wray–derived menace of “Dull Knife” to the breathlessly executed Bo Diddley–meets–Jack the Ripper rave-up “That’s My Revenge.”