What makes the Fleshtones' first album a terrific record is that these guys love their garage-rock R&B not just for how it sounds but for what it can say. They're passionately romantic and passionately angry, too. And passionately knowing about all of it.

Every cut kicks in. There's a palpable joy in the way guitarist Keith Streng's Ventures-style Sixties guitar will suddenly explode into street fights of dancing noise, in the bigger-than-life shudder and throb of Bill Milhizer's drums and Marek Pakulski's bass, and in Peter Zaremba's broken-field harp and yelped, lunging vocals. And even the political number, "R-I-G-H-T-S," comes across because it makes you jump around–which is how good agitprop ought to work. The real political message, though, is under the surface: it's an insistence on treating the world as an adventure and persevering even when the adventure kicks you in the teeth. For my money, this simple, unaffected LP is the best rock & roll to come out of New York in the past year. And you can dance to every blessed minute of it. (RS 368)

TOM CARSON