At first, you think they’re merely terrible. Then your man starts singing, and it’s at this point you start examining the record sleeve for evidence that the whole thing’s some kind of a joke. The Flash Express are an exceptionally bad blues-rock bar band: all baby’s-first-blues-scale basslines and skidding 200-mile-an-hour riffola (if you fly by quick enough, they can’t see how shoddy the workmanship is) – but it’s when the words and vocal mannerisms arrive in earnest that we see that what we have here is so much weirder than just a terrible band: it’s a shambling Frankenstein monster of every rock cliché you’ve ever heard of, come to incredible, terrifying life.
As far as accidental pastiche goes, it’s unbelievably thorough: not a single dead rock horse is left unflogged. Ersatz Southern accent? Check. Occasional tonsil-shattering hollering? Check. Standard-issue rock’n’roll-cliché phraseology straight out of Magnetic Poetry, Rock School Edition, check (sample phrases: ‘subway train’; ‘we got the beat’; ‘you’re lookin’ good, you’re lookin’ so fine’ and, it goes quite without saying, ‘one two three four’). Use of expletives to indicate personal ferociousness? Check (songs tend to address unnamed motherfuckers). Disappointingly, a glance at the band’s photograph confirms that the Express are indeed three human males from Hollywood, and not alien scientists from planet Zorp who formed a band after years of studying ‘garage’ ‘rock’ ‘music’ by listening to 32nd-generation John Spencer Blues Explosion bootlegs and reading badly translated copies of Sounds.
It’s not that it’s even unremittingly unlistenable (a thumbs-in-overalls rockabilly cover of Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ isn’t the worst): it’s just that it’s hard to enjoy the supposed rocktasticness over 38 straight minutes of dead words and ripped off ideas flying at you like bugs against a windshield. Or, to keep to the monster-movie parlance, all the bits are recognisable and seem to be in working order, but you can’t stop staring at the bolts.