Album Review: Claytown Troupe, "Out There"

When CLAYTOWN TROUPE left their old label Island after their debut Through the Veil took them from playing sweaty little clubs to headlining sell0out shows at The Astoria, they then changed labels and spent 2 years writing and recording this little gem in New York. The label that snatched them up was the American side of EMI. The reason for the change -- they'd lost faith in the people that have been taking care of them at Island.

Out There is fucking heavy, actually, and in the face of the explosive Seattle fashion scene, fits the time nicely. Soundwise it's big, fat, and juicy, with the power to stop a rhino. It would seem that their time away has been well spent, and getting out of England has maybe given them time to reassess themselves. How about this for a good way to start an album -- on "The Big Wheel" they've got what sounds like Zulu warriors chanting.

What relevance it has to anything, I don't know, but it's novel.

I'm in one of those "I like everything moods." It's nice to have a change once in a while. I'll then again it's early days!

B+

Peter Grant

Riff Raff

April 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!