The Warlocks - 'Surgery' (Birdman Records)Released 05/09/05,

Any Black Rebel Motorcycle Club fans who remain unconvinced by their favourite group’s decision to go a bit country could do worse than take solace in ‘Surgery’, the second album from The Warlocks.

The record is cut from a very similar cloth to BRMC’s debut: a little bit of The Velvet Underground, a move of two from Spacemen 3, and a major chunk of the Jesus And Mary Chain.
The riffs are Bo Diddley on horse tranks; the vocals sound like they were recorded in a wind tunnel; lyrical references to novacaine, sickness and surgery throughout suggest a similarly druggy, nihilistic streak to JAMC’s Reid brothers.

Sadly, much like BRMC, The Warlocks never really manage to turn classy influences into anything more than a competent tribute. Mostly the songs are much too long, yet they never manage to induce the celestial rock’n’roll trance state of the best Spacemen or Spiritualized records. Like BRMC, they fail to grasp that the spirit of early JAMC records was not simply about the noise and the drugs, but the creation of something beautiful, or at least honest out of apparent chaos and destruction.

‘Psychocandy’ burnt rock’n’roll to the ground more convincingly than The Sex Pistols ever did; The Warlocks achieve little, merely poking around in the ashes of something long past.