Gas Wylde Band

Once in a long while a record comes along that is so surprising in feel, quality and sound that one looks for immediate comparisons with the music industry’s bigger
names: Neil Young, Springsteen, the Stones and the ilk. With ‘’Last Man Out’ the Gas Wylde Band have produced a record that evokes the best of 70’s rock with
more than just a hint of the 60’s folk protest sound and more.Kicking off with the bittersweet acoustic hooks of ‘Things We’ll Never Do’ one is reminded of the heyday of Cat Stevens before the band takes to tackling the bigger
issues with the sinuous countrified riffing of ‘International Waters’, a musical call to arms regarding the mistreatment of refugees. Next there’s the stand-out Stonsey
ballad ‘Last Place on Earth’, the Young like guitar raunch of ‘Camp X-Ray’, (for David Hicks formerly of Guantanamo Bay) one that neatly merges the spoken word and
soulful counterpoint vocal questioning of ‘This Isn’t History’, a clever reflective number that places a listener in a seedy back lane somewhere in Saigon back in 1974.
Other tracks nobly support this top heavy hit list. The ponderous chug of ‘Mr Nobody’ ‘the right to vote’s like cancer it don’t set me free’ sounds like a single Tom Waits
could put to good use. Moving up a gear the sound of the wide open plains is clearly heard in the paired back keys and guitar arrangements of the wistful ‘Heartless Little Country’. The album concludes with a pair of hidden tracks ‘Factory Moses’ and ‘Black Maths’, two mighty suburban odes penned when Wylde was a young songsmith in his early phase back in Brisbane.

‘Last Man Out’ will be certainly the vehicle for Gas Wylde Band to mark out new territory in the all too often hackneyed country rock genre, a place every bit as
desolate as the cover of this fine album.