by Derric Miller
— Managing Editor —
The Erotics haven been around for quite some time, always delivering top-notch snark and vicious, biting Punk/Hard Rock that you never really hear anywhere else. The odd thing about the band will always be how noisy and yet melodic the songs sound. There is buried deep within the rancid bowels of the band an appreciation for Hair Metal, otherwise, the songs wouldn’t be as catchy and the band just wouldn’t be this illegal amount of fun.
Lead singer and guitarist Mike Trash (surely his baptismal name) is a hilarious dude on social media. If you ain’t following the band on Facebook, do it now. Recently, someone left a comment calling him “the fat Nikki Sixx” and he responded he’s the hottest fat dude around and that he’s fat because the commenter’s mom made him pasta before he slept with her, ending with, “Fight me!” If that alone doesn’t make you want to hear their new studio album The Songs Remain Deranged go lose a fight with a rat trap.
It’s almost like a W.A.S.P-inspired writing session became the first track, “Angel, Devil, & Me.” It’s got an old school Metal edge to it, and to be honest, if Dave Mustaine and Blackie Lawless each donated a vocal chord to a human to make him a lead singer, it’d sound a lot like Mike Trash. Frantic and pummeling, this shouty anthem is just the beginning of a gnarly album.
“Things We Do in the Night” has everything you’d hope for from The Erotics. It’s got a backstory, a mammoth sing-along chorus, and again, oddly melodic guitar passages. If you can get away with using words like “dichotomy” in an The Erotics review, you’d have to use it, because how a band makes sense of bloody barbed-wire sonic explosions and bacon-wraps them in melody is what makes them unique. The hooks just don’t stop, ever, with these guys.
“Dirty Little Secret” gropes you with a sexual groove, and when Trash emphasizes the word “dirty” on the chorus, it’s hard to figure out how a guy can sing this way, this harshly, this long, and still have any remnants of vocal chords left. It’s like Andi Deris or Mark Tornillo harsh; guess it’s all in the DNA, because singing along with this sort of edge to your voice if you weren’t born with it is going to end in injury.
Some things just naturally go together, like peanut butter and jelly, or “Steroids and Cocaine.” Philosophically, you can only get so deranged off one or the other, but put them together and the magic fun starts. When Trash is yelling, “Going down motherfucker, going down!” you can feel the poison damaging the nervous system in the best way possible.
Keeping up with the Joneses, The Erotics even wrote a song based on common sayings like “This is why we can’t have nice things!” on the track “Nice Things.” It’s not quite as riotous as “I Dismember You,” surely a take on Skid Row’s hair ballad, right? Hahah, nope. It’s a lot closer to a band like Blitzkid, somehow putting a smiley face on an ode to murder.
They cease the shenanigans with “Only When I Bleed,” a song dedicated to how all relationships are a soul-sucking construct based on co-dependence and hurting the other until it feels too good to ever let go without a bloody fight. Sure, it could just be based on a generalization, but it certainly seems uniquely personal the way it’s delivered into your arms like a stillborn baby that somehow has a tattoo and a nose ring.
The Erotics deserve a bigger audience. The songs are all simple, tight and memorable, there’s personality galore in the band, and this type of music isn’t as popular as it should be. It’s too bleakly metallicized to be Pop Punk and it’s too mainstream to be Metal, as it were. Punk/Hard Rock is certainly one way to define the band, but that’s just the starting point. Hearing is believing with these guys, so clean the wax out, let the blood flow and get as deranged as they just ordered you to be.
Genre: Punk/Hard Rock
Band:
Mike Trash-lead vocals, guitar
Johnny Riot-drums
Doug Reynolds-guitar
Tony Culligan-bass
Tracklisting:
01. Angel, Devil, & Me
02. Blood Of The Wasted
03. Things We Do In The Night
04. Midnight Creatures
05. Dirty Little Secret
06. Steroids & Cocaine
07. Stop, Drop, & Roll
08. Nice Things
09. Ain’t Talkin’ To You
10. I Dismember You
11. Best Song Of The Night
12. Pretty Little Bomb
13. Only When I Bleed
Label: Vile Vinyl Records
Online:
https://www.facebook.com/theerotics
Hardrock Haven rating: 
(8.1 / 10)
