Legend notwithstanding, I’ve heard Peters’s various bands on comps before and have never really been that impressed. Admittedly, I’ve never owned a full-length of their stuff either. Then I get this and I’m both surprised and floored: think of an updated version of Wild in the Streets-era Circle Jerks, except with better songs. I mean, it’s almost eerie how much Peters sounds like a primed-and-ready Keith Morris; there’s the same bile and venom, the same confidence and vocal swagger, the same fucking syllable stresses. It’s amazing. As the name implies, there’s a weird “Wild West gunfighter” theme threading its way through a few of the songs that I could definitely do without, including one, “Gunfighter,” written from the perspective of a kid who “killed his motherfuckin’ whore.” Said kid asks the question, “What good’s a woman for?” and the song just makes me cringe every time I hear it. That and the last one, “Marry Me,” in which Peters sounds horrifically drunk and mutters a la Shame McGowan over a lone guitar are the two that I’ll have to pass on. Regardless, the eight other songs that do cook on this album do so with such surety and precision that I’m willing skip past those two and move on. In the band photos, Peters looks like a crazed and damaged leprechaun, and minus the aforementioned songs, the majority of the lyrics are a shitload smarter than I figured they’d be, which really begs the question, “Why bother with the filler?” Anyway, it turns out that sometimes you pass judgement on a band and then they smack you with something out of left field and you’re left, for the most part, loving it. This one’ll get a few rotations.
–keith (Disaster)