Hot Lunch - Hot Lunch (CD)

Hot Lunch:  San Francisco, California.

Hot Lunch is a punk ‘n’ roll band from the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area that specializes in getting loud, getting weird and getting rad. The quartet’s unique blend of brown-acid skate-rock and wah-fuzz proto-metal was born in the bowels of skatanic rituals, biker beer busts and wizard staff meetings.

Kicking off in prime, amped up MC5 style with “Handy Denny” it’s clear that Hot Lunch are out to grab you by the nuts like a pit bull and keep squeezing until this album has wrung you dry. Within the first two songs the band have ripped their way through more riffs that the first two Black Sabbath albums put together and there is no let up from here on in. “Ripped At The Seams” opts for a tight but loose Blue Cheer style grind with Eric Shea’s manic vocal delivery evoking John Garner at his most deranged in the early days of Sir Lord Baltimore. Other bands that Hot Lunch tip their hats to through the course of these nine tracks, to varying degrees include the spastic blues of The Groundhogs, the theatrical intensity of The Alice Cooper Band, the raw, soulful blast of Grand Funk Railroad, the explosive crunch of The Who through to the trippy psychedelia of The Doors... albeit without an incoherent drunken pub singer fronting them.