Rockhouse Strutters – S/T
Moodog Music MOONLP2303
My Baby Don’t Rock – Look So Deep – Her Love Rubbed Off – Cruising – Mexicali Baby – Go, Boy Go / Poor Lucky Daddy-O – Little Bit More – Plantation Boogie – Sure To Fall – Mean Little Mama – Rock House
The Rockhouse Strutters are a Finnish band formed by Maku Tuominen (Willie and the Wolves) on vocals, Jukka Kuitunen on guitar, Iikku Riepponen (Mike Bell and the Belltones) on double bass and Jouni Häyrinen on drums. The band has an excellent overall sound. One can feel that the quartet has worked hard to develop a personal sound and a style of its own somewhere between classic Rockabilly and a little more modern Rock’n’Roll.
What strikes you at first when you have the record in hand is the fairly high number of covers appearing on the track listing, no less than 10 out of twelve songs. One could fear that so many covers, some of which are very well known, could work against the group. And even if the Rockhouse Strutters miss their version of Her Love Rubbed Off (but it is impossible to go after Carl Perkins and the Cramps reunited), the group has enough style and personality to succeed in establishing itself and keep things interesting. As proof, listen to their excellent rock versions of Go, Boy Go and Sure To Fall, which offer a complete rereading of the original. In addition, they have the intelligence also to cover more obscure numbers and contemporary tunes (The Jive Romeros’ Look So Deep).
Added to this are their two compositions (Cruisin’ and Poor Luck Daddy-O), which give an overview of their talent for writing tunes. The band should have more confidence in themselves because these are two excellent songs, and the fact that there are only two of them is pretty frustrating for the listener (or is it a particularly crooked commercial manoeuvre to set the stage for their next album?)
Cruisin has Neo-Rockabilly accents, which suits their sound very well, and Poor Luck Daddy-O is more in a boogie-blues vein. So, in the end, it’s a good record that will give you an excellent time of Rock’n’Roll and we hope that the next Rockhouse Strutters album will be at least half composed of original songs.
Available here.
