Hackamore Brick - One Kiss Leads To Another 1971

After playing together in various incarnations since their college years, this group of NYC raggamuffins emerged in 1970 with One Kiss Leads to Another under the name Hackamore Brick. While this solid slab of proto-punk pop-flavored rock & roll would be the only output from the band for almost 40 years as they disappeared under the waves of commercial failure, the years that followed saw the legacy of the album growing. Critics loved it, and as new listeners wrapped their heads around what was becoming a definitive cult classic, rave reviews began popping up sporadically, some citing the band as the first to have a "post-Velvets" sound. From the opening strains of album kick-off track "Reachin'," the songs here find their sound somewhere between the quiet melancholia of the Velvet Underground's reflective third album and the more high-strung rock of Loaded. Chick Newman's strained vocals (often buried in the mix) can evoke Lou Reed's disaffected big city cool, and the straightforward songwriting and playing are cut from a similar cloth as well. As indebted to the Velvets as the group clearly is, Hackamore Brick's brilliance comes more from their sophomoric demeanor, as all the songs have an offhanded, almost observational feeling to them that separates them from the gnarly street tales and world-weary junkie seriousness of Lou Reed and co.'s classic tunes. While songs like "Peace Has Come" and "Someone You Know" are heavy-hearted enough, they never feel airless, but keep a meandering pace, coming off more like friends jamming on an autumn day than some chronicle of the N.Y.C. freak show that was very much alive and surrounding the band at that time. Direct, unassuming rock & roll numbers like "I Watched You Rhumba" and "Oh! Those Sweet Bananas" predicted the buzzing and youthful spirit of the Modern Lovers or the Feelies, while "Radio" takes on the same flip character as "Sitting on My Sofa"-style Kinks tunes, extolling the virtues of the FM dial with a goofy grin. Only the drifty "And I Wonder" falls into some of the proggy cliches of the era, leaving the rest of the album soundly rooted in foundational rock & roll aesthetics, delivered with a passionate and wonderful lack of sophistication that makes One Kiss Leads to Another every bit as worthy of praise as the downtown N.Y.C. bands that went on to greater exposure all around them. On par with other lost wonders like Virgin Insanity's Illusions of the Maintenance Man or Ed Askew's Little Eyes, this album has a hidden power that was not just ahead of its time in 1970, but still unfolding decades later. AMG.

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