Fashion Central #15 October 2014

The band who unexpectedly turned old-fashioned rockabilly into a sensation during the height of synthesized new wave.
Sporting bodacious pompadours, tattoos, and leather jackets, the Stray Cats looked like a rockabilly band straight out of central casting. That was by the design of Brian Setzer, Lee Rocker, and Slim Jam Phantom, a trio of Long Island renegades who were attempting to keep the fire of old-time rock & roll burning during the height of punk and new wave. It took some time - and a trip across the Atlantic - for them to succeed, but when they did, it was beyond all expectations…

Hot on the heels of the excellent ‘live in Cologne’ CD/DVD set, Jaded Heart are back with a new album and a new line-up, co-founder and drummer Axel Kruse having departed and been replaced by Bodo Stricker (Callejon) whilst live guitarist Masa Eto has also been bought into the fold to thicken up the band’s sound. The result is a full-on blast of melodic and heavy hitting metal with hints of Tank, Queensryche and Europe working their way through the album’s eleven songs. For classic metal fans, there is no doubt that ‘fight the system’ should be high on your list of albums to check out.

Monarchie und Alltag, the 1980 debut album by Die Fehlfarben, is one of the key releases of the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), the German equivalent of new wave. Die Fehlfarben were never quite the same after Monarchie und Alltag – constant lineup shuffling, intermittent streaks of band activity – and though the album fell upon deaf ears initially, it grew in stature over the years and rightly became recognized as a cornerstone of modern German rock, earning a deluxe reissue in 2000…