Z-Rocks - Z-Rocks
#592
1981 Housekeeping
Z-Rocks
Z-Rocks
Genre: 404 Error
3.75 out of 5
Highlights:
You Know My Name
The Teacher’s a Punk
There’s no data about this group. Besides that they were from Houston. If you go to their website, that still exists but most of the links are dead. It’s really weird, the band’s splash page is still there and all the licks take you to…well….one of them goes to a Myspace page.
This is a band that was still pimping the late 70s Elvis Costello sound and, while it’s dated. By 1981 and we had all moved on, one listen to “Don’t Ever Tell Me” has me missing it. They are really good at it. They’re also really excellent at mining the tropes they love, like the late 60s British sound of “Was it a Dream?”
In a way, how they play with so many styles they remind me a bit of Irving, the SilverLake band from the early aughts. Except that, while Irving used a host of styles to craft that delicious album, Good Morning, Beautiful, they all sound like a part of one band. And that’s really something because there were a lot of songwriters in that group. Z-Rock sounds, instead, like everybody else they are trying to, whether it be Joe Jackson on Elvis or whoever. They don’t have an identity of their own.
That might explain their (lack of) longevity. Shortevity?
For some inexplicable reason they reverse one of their tracks for the last track and that’s a demerit right there, guys. Only guys…come on, you couldn’t add an original track instead of some bizzarro experimentation that doesn’t fit the rest of the album’s oeuvre?
This is a very short mini-album. It almost didn’t make the cut cuz it’s <20 minutes but I am so starved for anything catchy in 1981 that I allowed it.
It’s the first 9 tracks on this compilation: https://music.apple.com/us/album/history/129053996
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