Handsome Jack
Handsome Jack
(Stampeded Records)

Buffalo’s Handsome Jack are not only keenly recreating the kind of punk-imbibed, sleazoid blooze and 1970s rock and roll that boomingly poured out—along with certain kind of thick, thick smoke—from the shag-carpeted interiors of kustom vans so many years ago. In playing their power-loaded riff rock, they also prove to be real believers and practitioners of the too often lost ethos of that era. That means shrugging off the notion of long gaps between putting out records as well as eagerly packing their guitars and drums like long-haired rock gypsies and taking their grift to the road. Coming in less than year since 2007’s Heatseeker, Handsome Jack has issued a brutally good self-titled follow up. Strewn with precise heavy rock and a collection fist-pumping anthems-to-be, it’s the ongoing story of a real-deal rock band that we’ve been lucky enough to watch grow up in front of us. “Nobody’s Home” is a building, explosive number that shows just how far the quartet has come since their days cutting class as Lockport teens. It’s a snarling salvo of epic proportions where ZZ Top meet Queens of the Stone Age in a dark boogie to the end of the world. “Setting Sun” harks back to Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold”—a qualified kustom van klassic, now that I think of it—but Handsome Jack offer it up with a grimmer, grimier delivery proving a side which the Nuge would detest with bile: punk. The thing with Handsome Jack is that the more you start think they are on a Southern rock streak, the more you realize they are more accurately instead the spiritual children of SST bands like Black Flag and St. Vitus. This album is a kicker. Oh yeah—and the road thing? Uh huh, they’ve got that covered. Following a whirlwind tour that has taken them across the country for a month, the Jack lads return home this Saturday, June 21, for a show at Mohawk Place with the Hot Rails and Love Parade.

—donny kutzbach