Thirst

If Jon Spencer Blues Explosion had been a Motown act, it's safe to bet that band would have sounded a lot like England's Waves of Fury. This quartet of raspy-throated, grimy guitar-wielding hip-thrusters, steeped in both early R&B and '60s garage-rock history, do their musical forebearers proud. The opening track, "Death of a Vampire," is cleverly flavored with two forever perfect, classic songs—"Louie Louie" and Steve Wonder's "Uptight"—with the faintest allusion to the former's simple 4/4 urgency and the latter's clarion horns cutting through the morass. It's a call to the dance floor. Carter Sharp's dripping sneer and the shards of guitar feedback set to a granite stomp on tunes like "Businessman's Guide to Witchcraft" make fearsome bedfellows. More often than not, those grating, gyrating rhythms are rendered somewhat civilized by glaringly sure horns taken straight from one of a dozen horn-highlighting hits of the '60s. The delightfully chilling "Killer Inside Me" sounds—as does much of Thirst—like it was recorded in a dark, dank London sewer in the middle of the night.