Slaves are extraordinary fun live: a duo with a singing stand-up drummer and a guitarist prone to playing while being passed across the heads of the audience, and blessed with the underrated gift of being amusing between songs. In those circumstances, brief blasts of noise, a couple of chords and a shouted chorus are all you need to keep up the momentum. On record, however, you need rather more. It’s not so much that Slaves don’t capture the excitement of their live show on record, more that their live show isn’t designed for transfer to a major label album. The riffs of songs such as Wow!!!7am or Hey or Do Something are strong enough, but the formula “riff, primitive bash of drums, bellowed chorus” wears thin pretty quickly. Great garage-rock needs to sound, in the words of John Peel, as if the instruments are playing themselves, but on record Slaves always sound a bit too self-conscious. Catch them live if you want to hear why they ended up with their rather unlikely major label deal.
