Midwestern lean and mean - and this time w/o big brass section - Crow's second album is a heap of Grand Funk-inspired bass grooves bolstered by deft keyboard playing with a big ol' side of dirty white boy rock 'n' soul licks. It does tend to drag on the slower numbers, especially "Gone, Gone, Gone". Fun, dumb, and....

1990 saw a ton of great and diverse releases from the hip-hop genre. This wasn't one of them.

After adding on a rhythm section (John and Hilary Stench, from Pearl Harbor and the Explosions), Edge and Creed set about creating song-centered, more refined takes on earlier themes. This resulted in a furious output of music in a short period of time, which ended when Edge left for a solo career in France. The two key LP's from this time are 1982's 3rd From the Sun and the lesser-known Blood On The Moon in 1981. Of the two, it's usually 3rd From the Sun which nominally gets the kid glove retrospective treatment, and for good reason - it's certainly the most outwardly "space-rock" album, of all the Chrome releases. It centers on a giant, eight-minute-plus, Gothic-style rocker called "Armageddon", has this bizarre alien insect face on the cover, and Damon even roped his then-girlfriend Fabienne Shine to guest vocal on a few tracks. Her work on "Shadows of a Thousand Years" is especially noteworthy. But do not discount Blood On The Moon, either - which might just be the absolute perfect teaming of Edge/Creed and the Stench Brothers on record, especially from a technical perspective. Simply put, both of these albums are stone-cold winners, and the lest vestiges of sanity before Edge took it with him to Europe for a string of miserable Creed-less solo records.

Even though it's a departure from the earlier Chrome sound there's nothing mainstream in the least about Red Exposure, which is the closest they ever got to recording for a major label (Beggars Banquet). The jagged Stooges-psych-punk edges have been smoothed down for the most part, replaced by a warped anti-social retro/futuristic mentality with vague roots in New Wave. The previous EP release Read Only Memory functioned much in the same fashion, but in a repetitive dance vein. In some respects, this material is even darker than anything on HMLP or Alien Soundtracks - how does the garbled grind of "Jonestown" suit you?

For all intents and purposes, Chrome becomes a duo with this record, even though Gary Spain played bass on a few tracks. But now they have free rein, and in this anything-goes bout they do not compromise a thing. Creed's guitar slash which opens "TV As Eyes" comes ripping through your speakers like a wave of dinosaurs and has to be one of the most hair-raising sounds in music ever, bar none. It's weird to pigeonhole the music here as industrial or any other genre - simply put, I call it "Chrome music" because I have never heard anyone either intentionally sound like this, or do it by accident! Even on the slower tracks there's a desperate, manic sort of tension that's hard to ignore, as if you're trapped in some kind of post-apocalyptic maze with a clock counting down against you. Edge's incessant, trash-can banging which serves as drumming matches perfectly with Creed's angular guitar lines and riffs, which are dastardly dark mood-wise, but nothing at all to do with blues. This is definitely one of those punk/psych documents which not only defies categorization but also manages to elude discovery to this very day. Which makes it a favorite of mine, of course!