9 / 10
The flawless 'Rough Trade Shops Rock And Roll', over two CDs, places the current uprising into a thrilling historical continuum. There's brilliant, obvious stuff like The Stooges, MC5, Birthday Party, The Fall, Billy Childish, The Cramps, Suicide, Make Up, Mudhoney, and an awful lot of that most diligent torchbearer, Jon Spencer. The Von Bondies (alongside a clutch of Detroit talent), The Hives, The Beatings and Love As Laughter make welcome reappearances. But the focus is, pleasingly, on rarer and more transgressive rock'n'rollers than the whitebread'n'speed gang who constitute much of 'New Blood'. Some of this music is cartoonish, dumb, sicko, crude, recorded in a blocked toilet by Very Bad Men. All of it, crucially, is amazing. Better still, it proves the New Rock Revolution started before most of us were born, and won't be over for a good while yet. Hey-ho, let's go!
John Mulvey
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