Vinyl Dust-off: Budgie's In For The Kill

By Lliam Easterbrook
[creative arts bureau chief]

Grade: B

Having been in the mood for some pleasurable pain earlier this week, I made an appointment with my girl Sasha at Funhouse Tattoos in Vancouver. Caught in the midst of the tattoo gun’s buzz, I heard a deadly riff shooting from the shop’s stellar sound system:  guitar tone, relaxed production—what is that? I said to myself. Having put the tunage on herself, I asked Sasha. “This is Budgie, man,” she replied, in between cries of  “Ooh baby, I can rock and roll/ Ooh baby, get out of my soul.” That man is Burke Shelley, a “slap-a-da-bass” screamer on par with Rush’s Geddy Lee (but with a voice that doesn’t make you want to dig your eardrums from your skull with a dental scaler). And the band, Budgie, who hail from Cardiff, Wales, largely remain an uncelebrated relic of 70’s hard rock.

Now the irony here is two fold. First, a band as dirty and heavy sounding as Budgie should damn rightly have a name as timid and unassuming as Budgie; and even though the album art displays a pretty menacing bird of prey, the tame name of Budgie still makes me laugh after hearing how tasty some of these riffs are. Shelley wails, “Raven black is on my track/ Please show me how to neutralize the knife.” over choppy guitars on the single “Crash Course in Brain Surgery,” which is the second irony, because, coincidently, the three tattoos I permanently had incisioned into my epidermis that day had to do with ravens—two based on mythological narrative, and one for its aesthetic antiquity—so Shelley’s raven lyric was unexpected, fitting and welcomed as I lay in the midst of the needle’s sear.

Budgie, along with other hard rock staples from this early to mid seventies era—Zeppelin, Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest etc—can sometimes sound a lot alike: prominent guitars, deep bass lines and heavy handed drums; and most of them tailored themselves around a deep-seeded blues sensibility. Budgie’s sound is typical of its generation in rock, but they explore more progressive (and heavy) song structures, in my opinion, than their metallic brethren—except for perhaps the one and only Black Sabbath. With multiple songs reaching the nine to ten minute mark, In for the Kill sounds more like an extended jam than a cohesive hard rock album. Songs like the aforementioned “Crash Course” rip and tear with crunching brevity, while the ten minute “Zoom Club” takes flight, building itself up to a thunderous climax before crashing down like a bird of prey in a blur of screeching guitars and pounding drums. Good shit, man.

So all in all, this past Tuesday was a good day; the sun was shining and the Bonitas were flowery; I got some ink done and was introduced to a band I’d only vaguely heard of before, but never gave a spin. Gifts abound and gifts around; that’s how this art thing works, my friends, how rock and roll works: get a gift of something found and give a gift of something sound. Until next time, all. Cheers.

Play it loud.
Play it proud.