Sunday, November 22, 2009

Stomp Your Feet & Shake Your Brains!







Juan DeLa Cruz
Shake Your Brains
1972
Ripped @ 320
w/3% recovery
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I was on a job with several Phillipino co-workers. We happened to begin talking about music (duh!) and I asked them if they had ever heard of Juan De La Cruz. They both looked at each other and began laughing. They said "of course we know about Juan De La Cruz!" As they did not seem the type who liked heavy rock I asked them how they knew about them. I was then informed that Juan De La Cruz is the name of the national icon of the Phillipines, the same as Uncle Sam in the U.S.. Now didn't I feel stupid and enlightened at the same time. Every time I hear this album I start laughing again. Hope you enjoy it. (I have several more if the response is there).
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Juan De La Cruz (a band, not a man, so it's filed under "J") was a hard-rock powerhouse powertrio from the Phillippines who flourished in the nineteen seventies. If you're hip to other obscurites from the era, imagine a cross between Buffalo and Los Dug Dug's! This bootleg-looking disc reissues one of their earliest albums (no date given, sorry, but we'd guess '71 or so), and it's a killer. Totally rocked out bluesy stoner jams, with brilliantly fucked sex and party obsessed lyrics ("get drunk all day, get down all night", "I'll just wait for you down in the alley / and I'll show you how it can be"). And guitarist Wally Gonzales has got his acid-psych leads down, man! It's not clear who's singing (it might be the drummer, an American who previously played in the equally primal Japanese psychrock band Speed, Glue, & Shinki) but whoever it is, he's got the perfect delivery for this stuff, which includes one of our all-time favorite garage-psych songs, "I Wanna Say Yeah" -- perhaps the ultimate rock n' roll song title/lyric *EVER*. I mean, yeah! None of today's punks, stoners, or garage revivalists can touch that. text from Aquarius records SF.
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The Smith-penned 'Shake Your Brain' is another gem that deserves 'classic' recognition. The spotlight though, is on the title song. A song about how important music is to the Filipino and should be one of the top 5 best Filipino songs ever written. All the planets were definitely aligned when JDLC recorded this masterpiece. From the opening acoustic guitar riff and piano accompaniment to it's beautiful lyrics and Wally Gonzales' awe-inspiring guitar solo, it is the perfect song that touches the very core of being Filipino. The impact that this song and album made on Pinoy Rock was never imitated and can never be duplicated.
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Tracklist

01 - Take You Home
02 - I Wanna Say Yeah
03 - Palengke
04 - Shake Your Brains
05 - Himig Natin
06 - Pagoda De Pahinga
07 - Pinoy Blues
08 - Beep Beep
09 - We Love You
10 - Last Song
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Get it HERE

1 comments:

massiosare89 said...

Great album, graet band, thanks a lot!!