Album Review: New England, "You Can't Keep Living This Way!"

A riot of noise and guts is my first reaction on hearing NEW ENGLAND's debut album You Can't Keep Living This Way, on the independent label Streetlink. But there's more to them than that.

Reaching out in a very direct style, they avoid the humdrum cliches so common with many hard rock acts looking to get a break, and instead concentrate their efforts towards a more assertive landscape. There are no meaningless rantings. Lyrically, the band are getting their message across though that may not seem apparent if you judged it on the song titles. But "No Zone" and "War" pack a mean punch if you listen a little closer. Final track "Love" is a unique blend of striking melody, interesting changes, and a wild clatter of thunder to finish.

They've obviously listened to LED ZEP. Well, they do "Communication Breakdown" and there are traces of KILLING JOKE within the raw harshness. They're something of a HM band with plenty of street cred.

This is a good opener for a band with a healthy attitude and an individual stance. It's no classic but the baby's kicking and definitely alive!

Grade B

Mike Harris

Riff Raff

August 1991

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!