This is much better than it has any right to be. Three decades after the Dolls first strutted their dimestore-Stones stuff on New York's wild side, David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Harold Kane shook London's RFH with punchy retakes of classics from their first two platters. When those included "Trash", "Babylon", "Jet Boy" and "Lookin' For A Kiss" , how could they miss? Naturally Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan are missed, but add-on axeman Steve Conte is a slicker player than Junkie Johnny ever was.
You can put your arms around this memory.
A solo vehicle for 16 Horsepower leader David Eugene Edwards, Woven Hand sacrifices his other outfit's thunderous bombast but retains the glowering intensity. This follow-up to 2002's self-titled debut is a masterstroke of creeping gothic: spectral percussion, skeletal guitar and Edwards' ominous voice, lent added weight by the religious significance of the lyrics (especially the startling "To Make A Ring"). Of his contemporaries, only Nick Cave and Willard Grant Conspiracy's Robert Fisher sound as eerily portentous.
Two years on from first album Delicate Shades Of Grey, Anglo-American duo Cicero Buck return with a more confident set of folk-pop songs. Songwriter/vocalist Kris Wilkinson is particularly effervescent on the tough "Gonna Fly" and the rippling Nashville skiffle of "Little Songbird", while Muscle Shoals veteran Jack Peck adds brass to the dusty twang of "Black Road".
