Mad Sin - 25 years/Still Mad

I'm not a fan of live albums in general and all the reasons for that are apparent on the first track of the new Mad Sin album.

None of the frenetic magic of the band is captured at all.

It's as if we are listening to some faded facsimile of them, and that's not fair on us, or them.

Thankfully the dank, and unimaginative, recording only last as long as the first track and from there on in the flickering flame takes hold, and as the fire kicks in it becomes business as usual as Koefte yelps his way through the bands back catalogue, while the rest of the band grind out song after song in front of what sounds like an appreciative audience.

Mad Sin along with Nekromantix are the bands who I felt revived the fortunes of the psychobilly scene, and while both are equally loved and loathed for dragging the sound forward, and bastardizing it to an extent, a degree of thanks has to be extended to them for breathing life into the corpse of a scene that was virtually dead on its legs.

That they have been going twenty five years is a testament to their commitment to their vision of how rock and roll with a twist of punk should sound.

Throwing in a cover of Demolition 23's Nothing's Alright had me bouncing about and following it with Vince Taylor's Black Cadillac was the icing on the cake.

Especially with the duel male and female vocals on it.

The sparring sounded................well cool as fuck.

In that one cover it encompassed everything that rock and roll should be. It's dirty it's sexy and it kicks the shit out of pretty much everything that the kids are listening to in the charts right now.

That's not to say that the covers are the highlights.

The throbbing bass that supports all the original material carries it all along at breakneck speed and it would be difficult not to allow yourself to get swept along with the band as they keep the needle bouncing in the red.

As an album to close the doors on the last twenty five years before the band step into the next, '25 Years - Still Mad' does an admirable job in underlining that Mad Sin are here to stay, and are still walking the walk rather than talking the talk.