Great reissue of a major obscurity in the back catalogue of Fred and Toody Cole aka Dead Moon/The Rats et al. Range Rats were a post-punk country and western group that used a Roland drum machine, confusing timelines and genres so completely that it couldn’t really be anyone else. Fred Cole is one of the great rock vocalists and it’s a stone pleasure to hear that voice wrap ping itself around some downer country and outlaw balladry, all played with the primitive elan and feel for non-flashy rock/roll aesthetics of Dead Moon et al. From 1985. Recommended.

Exact repro reissue of the second album from The Rats, Fred Cole’s classy punk/trash trio. Unlike the first album, this one sees Rod Rat vacate the drumstool in favour of Sam Henry of The Wipers. Henry has a more ‘lubricated’ style than Rod but Rod was one of the most primitive drum visionaries ever to wrassle the skins so that ain’t saying much. The addition of Henry gives em a little more propulsion and it sounds fucking great . No one so explicitly and so intuitively joined the dots between original garage punk aesthetics and the new punk rock scene quite so quickly and so stupely as Fred Cole and this album is a monument to his vision, combining classic 60s song-writing with ultra-stripped down guitars-as-guitars rock/roll action and DIY snot. Rod does actually appear on the album’s final track, the amazing “Animal” which features a cool freak out section at the end complete with Funhouse-style saxophone blurt. So, yeah, another fantastic installment in one of the greatest non-corporate rock sagas of the under-the-counter culture. Highly recommended.