"One of our key huntin’-and-peckin’ fingers recently had a run-in with an axe—the sharp, bladed kind we use for disassembling big hunks of wood for the fireplace, dontcha know—so this assignment is probably some cruel joke the editorial staff concocted. Har har. See how those chuckleheads like it when said blood-splattered axe gets FedExed to dB HQ with very specific instructions as to what they can do with it.
Our run-in with the Portland, OR rock band called the Ax—two dudes, a guitar and a drum set—involved less digital trauma, though some nonspecific neck trauma might have occurred. Twenty years ago, this would surely have been called grunge, but that’s basically just a lazy description for something that contains some or all of these elements in varying degrees: punk, metal, garage rock, noise. Check, check, check and check. All present and accounted for.
And apologies to the Ax for invoking this rather obvious comparison, but what the White Stripes (and, yeah, a few others) have demonstrated is that a guitar/drums duo can kick out the muthafuckin’ jams just fine as long as they have the riffs to back it up. And the Ax do. Not just guitar riffs either—the lazy-boy vocal hooks and happy-hands drumming are crucial to every one of these 14 songs doing a dirty dance all over the hi-fi. It’s the Mudhoney blues, Sonic Youth gnarl and bong-breath stink of Fu Manchu compressed into fuzzy, primal three-minute jags. All of which puts this Ax in better standing with us than that goddamn tetanus-carrying, orange-handled thing that nearly lopped off half of our pointin’ finger." DECIBEL MAGAZINE (August 2009) Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.