HEROES OF HISTORY - Lightning and Thunder

"I was pretty impressed right off the bat by the artwork and lo-fi promo material sent along with this. The kind of aesthetic and attention to detail usually reserved for high school notebook covers or Dungeons and Dragons character sheets. Then you notice that this was actually recorded at Used Kids by Mike Rep?! I thought that was odd, but after you listen to this you realize it does have whatever you want call the Columbus vibe", which is just another way of saying this is music made by weirdos. Semi-inept garage-rocking with a heavy metal influence. The Gizmos if they wrote songs about swords and sorcery instead of muff diving and partying? Early Rep/Jay catalog if they were more concerned with horror movies and fantasy novels instead of Lou Reed? Midnight doing Penetrators covers? Only in Ohio, Ill say that for sure. Mid-tempo rockers with dum-dum riffs, an eccentric singer who actually pulls this shit off sounding great and just goofily enough to make you really like his style. Backing vox are wonderfully dumb as are most if not all of these tunes. Rep gets the most out of these guys, making it sound just cruddy enough, guitar is solid, drums have just the right trashy sound, bass holds it all steady. There are at least ten songs here I love out of fourteen, which are all listenable at the very least. "A Quarter Werewolf" is the hit, "Zombies Gots To Eat", "Witch" (not a cover), "Welcome to My Grave", "Wormhole", all winners. "Rock Assassins" is their tough guy statement, and Im a believer. Loner-outsider-whatever garage-punk rock, this thing is really likeable for obvious reasons. I dont think theyre trying really hard to be funny-dumb here, I think theyre just trying to kick ass and fucking succeeding at it, with maybe a few laughs along the way. Id buy this on vinyl in a second, as long as they include the lyric sheet and band photo (pictured), which are very entertaining in their own right. Another one of those bands you could mistake for a KBD-punk classic if you didnlt know they were modern. Recommended to the highest degree!" -Rich Kroneiss, TERMINAL BOREDOM (Review of the CDR version from earlier this year).