Demon's Claws

The thing about garage rock (and by extension, garage punk) is that it's not really an album-oriented genre. How many essential modern garage albums are there? Time Bomb High School and Ultraglide in Black and that's it. (I'd add Veni Vidi Vicious to that list, but I don't want to get beat up.) So when Montreal's Demon's Claws put out an LP fitted with live cuts, alternate takes and some other noisy ruckus, it's still cool, even if it's not especially coherent. There's some great stuff her though, in the jangly, guitar-driven bop of "Unemployment," the acoustic balladry of "The Ballad of St. Laurent" and album highlight "Hypnotized," which sounds a bit like the Claws doing yodelling, Meat Puppets-styled cow punk. And most surprisingly for a comp like this, there's one tune ("Mona's Lunch") that's so clean and catchy it could be a rock single. Well, in an alternate universe where rock singles still existed.