RANDY:
You Can: CD
There’s something strangely refreshing about a Randy CD in the sense that they sing all of their songs about anarchist revolution, striving for economic equality, breaking the chains of big business, etc., but instead of slamming it into your head with a wall of sound and anger, they burrow a groove into your brain and let the ideas settle into the grooves. It’s a nice change of pace for someone like me, who spends so much time listening to walls of sound and anger. This is the second album to come through the Razorcake mailbox in the past few months, so I’m assuming that either this or Randy’s Human Atom Bombs (on Burning Heart Records) is a reissue because there’s a subtle departure between the sound of the two. Whereas Human Atom Bombs is heavy with the fifties rock’n’roll, You Can’t Keep a Good Band Down carries on more of an early-Clash tradition and filters in weird Queen snippets. Those snippets are kept to a minimum, though, and when you listen to the album as a whole, it’s easy to move beyond them. And even if this album isn’t as cohesive as Human Atom Bombs, Randy makes singing about a revolution so much fun. –Sean Carswell (G7 Welcoming Committee)