Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
People are strange when you’re a stranger…however the more you get to know them and with fortune the more dreamlike and wonderfully weird they become and when it comes to The Surreal McCoys, they don’t get much more magnificently odd and musically cool.
Take their new album, The Howl & The Growl, too whichever number you like, to which extreme fits your ears and the sense of fun and occasion they demand to be taken to, for in the depth of surreal passion, in the wake of all that went before it, The Howl & The Growl is nothing but charm personified.
The McCoys take the art of mixing a great pun and mixing it with a meaty beat that has the foot tapping and cutting a deep groove into the floorboards, a grove that by the end of the album has somehow worn through to the foundations and the top most point of soil is staring up at you with an absurd grin. It is in this groove that the surreal meets excellence and with great truth hidden gently away, the delightful shakes hands with the gifted and makes for a selection of songs that really know how to rock.
The Howl & The Growl, less of creating a bawl but certainly having a ball is the rubber stamp to all the songs that the band have put together for the album; but in songs such as Blonde-Sided, the subtle mix of Led Zeppelin’s guitar riff that dominates Whole Lotta Folsom, the fantastic Sweet F.A. and Lust Vigilantes (The Ballad of Razor Girl), The Surreal McCoys have thrown a party in which many will be invited and the only stipulation is that you must be open minded enough to revel in the abundant gratification that hits the listener upon first hearing and stays with them during the day, overshadowing anything else that comes their way.
The Howl & The Growl is not just a great album, it is one that in an age where the serious really overshadows the point of existence, that in which fun deserves top billing and one The Surreal McCoys exploit with absolute abandon. Top billing indeed, for there is nothing better than being considered odd enough to be brilliant.
Ian D. Hall