Honeymoon Killers
Love American Style
Fur Records, 1985

Like their friends (and later collaborators) Pussy Galore, The Honeymoon Killers (HK) mined the vein of rock and roll first explored by Iggy, The Birthday Party and The Cramps. Unlike Pussy (or at least early Pussy), HK stuck to their more traditional garage band song subjects: lousy B-flicks (they're named after one), pain and degradation as a metaphor to normal living ("Pain is Easy"), groovy '60's TV like Batman and Star Treck and vampire/S&M allusions. It's not painfully obvious but if you dig too deep into their songs, you see a sense of detached irony that I've never found in, say, The Cramps (more like the Ramones, in this respect).

They also include a fairly new target for garage bands in the '80s - that being dirtball Americana (see Big Stick and Killdozer for contemporary examples) "Good 'n' Cheap" describes the joy of living in the gutter while "Motor City" is pretty slef-explanatory and a good excuse to rev up the guitars to sound like a NASCAR race.

According to Trouser Press (link on the right), they went on for several years after this and eventually mutated into Boss Hogg with key members from Pussy Galore (Cristina left Pussy to join HK after this album). Jerry Teel, who was an interesting guitarist back then, is still playing around NYC. You can find their last collection available at Amazon. From the samples on the Amazon page, it sounds like they stayed pretty true to their original vision even if the recording is more studio-ish than this.

Enjoy.

Batman
Good 'n' Cheap