In the interests of full disclosure, I have to fess up—the Devilheads sent me a pretty cool t-shirt along with their album. If some band thinks they’re going to influence my underpaid ass with some crappy shirt, well, I’ve got four large bins of concert shirts gathering dust in the attic, so forget that! But I think I’m going to wear this one until it turns gray like the others. The Devilheads, hailing from South Lake Tahoe, are one of the hottest three-piece psychobilly bands to come across my desk in a long time. To be completely fair, Never Lucky is hardly innovative. There are songs aplenty about drinkin’, drivin’, kissin’, pinchin’ and squeezin’. The album starts off with “Find a Way Home” which sounds like a b-side from the Reverend. And yeah, at their most polished moments, they have a tendency to sound a lot like the Stray Cats (“Gonna Be a Fight,” “So Far Away”). But then there’s tracks like “I Like You Better Drunk” which dispenses with the romance and kicks the album into high gear. Too bad they left that song to the very end.
–eric (Self- released)