Sep 17, 2025
Raging Slab – What Have You Done
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Raging Slab – What Have You Done
The Atomic Bitchwax: The Atomic Bitchwax II (2000)
Following the enthusiastic response to their eponymous debut album, stoner rocker power trio The Atomic Bitchwax promptly raced back into the studio and emerged with this obviously titled, and frankly anticlimactic follow-up.
There, I said it!
That’s what happens when a semi-casual jam between friends “graduates” to a more serious professional endeavor -- as was the case with this one-time side-project for Monster Magnet lead guitarist Ed Mundell, ex-Godspeed bassist Chris Kosnick, and former Solace drummer Keith Ackerman -- expectations are raised and pressure grows to deliver something special.
And Bitchwax II was by no means crap, but it frankly wasn’t great: bursting out of somebody’s basement (or possibly their garage) in scenic, seaside Long Branch, New Jersey packed with high-intensity, low-hook retro-rockers like “Forty-Five,” “Play the Game” and “Marching on the Skulls of the Dead.”
In fact, I count just two five-star performances: “Cast Aside Your Masks” (no chance, mister, there’s a pandemic going on!) and closing instrumental, “Liquor Queen,” but keep in mind that this basically builds a song atop the red-hot guitar intro from Buffalo’s 1973 classic “Sunrise (Come My Way).”
Far more damning (and indicative of an exceedingly rushed writing and recording process), if you ask me, was the presence of five -- FIVE! -- instrumentals out of a total ten tracks!
As fabulous a shredder as he was, not even Mundell could keep things interesting on so many wordless exercises, which included frenzied opener “Ice Pick Freak,” the organ-enhanced “The Cloning Chamber,” and the very stoned, laid-back “Smokescreen,” featuring a guesting Warren Haynes of The Allman Brothers Band, Govt. Mule, etc. (*)
Having said all that, in my original All-Music Guide review, I insisted that “in a sea of retro-rocking stoner bands, the Bitchwax still stood out as one of the genre’s most promising new entries.”
So much for that prediction ... though they promptly returned in 2002 with the seven-track Spit Blood EP, both song quality and Ed’s commitment kept slipping, so Kosnick and Ackerman would soon be forced to carry on with Core guitarist Finn Ryan, while Mundell refocused on Monster Magnet.
By 2008, Ackerman had been replaced by Bob Pantella (ex-Raging Slab, Novadriver, etc.) and when Garrett Sweeny stepped in for Ryan in 2018, all three active members of The Atomic Bitchwax were suddenly, ironically also employed by Monster Magnet, which no longer featured Mundell ... go figure.
* I once smoked some of Warren’s pot, because he lived next door to a friend of mine on New York City’s Lower East Side, and it was so strong I literally couldn’t move or speak for an hour.
More Atomic Bitchwax: The Atomic Bitchwax.
Raging Slab
Pot Head Pixies
Raging Slab– Bitch To Kill
Raging slab - never never know
Raging slab - hell yawns before me
Raging Slab: The Dealer (2001)
Southern rock enjoyed a brief revival in the early 1990s, thanks in large part to The Black Crowes’ unlikely rise, but New York City’s own Raging Slab also did what they could with 1993’s absolutely marvelous Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert -- a powerhouse album that went tragically ignored.
Subsequent strife with their label, Def American, saw the band’s next album shelved indefinitely, and ‘96’s tellingly named Sing Monkey Sing was an intentionally unlistenable “fuck you record” aimed directly at label head Rick Rubin, who retaliated by exiling it to the Columbia Record Club.
Lawsuits came next, so when the group’s husband/wife team of Greg Strezmpka and Elyse Steinman retreated to their Pennsylvania farm to lick their wounds, most of us naturally assumed we’d heard the last of Raging Slab.
But, unbeknownst to fans, Greg and Elyse were merely waiting out the remainder of their contract, finally returning to action via 2001’s The Dealer, released through independent Tee Pee Records.
Alas, as I would write in the All-Music Guide, The Dealer was a brooding, bitter, often workmanlike record: overflowing with a whopping 16 tracks (they did have plenty of time to write them, after all), yet little of the inherent joy the group had once worn proudly on their tasseled sleeves.
And, lest we forget, lighthearted fun has always been as integral to southern rock as the darker stuff; could there ever have been a “Free Bird” or “Whipping Post” without a “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Flirtin’ With Disaster”?
But I digress ... The Dealer deals in heavy drugs (“Sir Lord Ford,” “Chasin’ the Dragon”), white trash misery (“Double Wide,” “I Don’t Know You”), and too damn many middling songs (“Too Bad,” “(What I See) Through You,” etc.).
Happier moments are confined to the soulful “Real Good Time,” the mildly hopeful “That’s Alright,” and the spunky “Flap Your Boogie Flap” and “The Ballad of Truly Mae,” where Strezmpka does his best Billy Gibbons impression while the band falls in behind like ZZ Top.
And when slide guitarist Steinman unleashes her blood-curdling croak on “Roadless Rider," the aforementioned “Chasin’ the Dragon,” and a re-booted “Good Mornin’ Lil’ Schoolboy,” you won’t know whether to duck and cover or cut and run.
Clearly, The Dealer was a pretty depressing affair, doomed to commercial failure, and yet Raging Slab encountered many smiling, grateful faces once they hit the road in U.S. clubs that summer.
Why, they may have even felt cautiously optimistic about their looming European tour, for which they were scheduled to depart New York on September 11, 2001 ... but when terrorists attacked the Twin Towers, Raging Slab’s chronic bad luck was officially elevated to “cursed” status.
So, the group decided to start working on their next album, instead, and this would show a marked musical improvement over The Dealer, even while reflecting the band’s cynical mood by being called Pronounced: Eat Shit.
p.s. -- R.I.P. Elyse Steinman, who lost her battle with cancer in 2017.
More Raging Slab: Assmaster, Raging Slab.
The Tea Party: The Edges of Twilight (1995)
When The Tea Party, from Windsor, Ontario, unveiled their third long-player The Edges of Twilight, 25 years ago today, they were alternately hailed and derided for their bold and uncannily punctilious fusion of Led Zeppelin and The Doors.
Vocalist and guitarist Jeff Martin sang just like a resurrected Jim Morrison and pulled off six-string miracles like he was Jimmy Page’s secret love child, leading a power trio completed by bassist/keyboardist Stuart Chatwood and drummer Jeff Burrows through a song cycle as derivative as it was brilliantly executed.
Plus, there was SO much more to it than that, as the group’s incredible musicianship, impeccable taste, and burgeoning curiosity about world music spurred them to travel far and wide in search of exotic instruments and sounds ...
Yes, to Kashmir and beyond!
And so, songs like “The Bazaar,” “Inanna” and the all-around spectacular first single “Sister Awake” commingle East and West as brazenly as they contrast folk rock subtlety and heavy rock bombast.
Meanwhile, listeners seeking modern variations of their beloved Zeppelin-isms will get their fill from the “Kashmir”-like “Fire in the Head,” melancholy “Correspondences,” folksy “Shadows on the Mountainside,” bluesy “Drawing Down the Moon,” and the cathartic “Walk with Me.”
I also have to mention a winsome acoustic guitar piece from Martin called “The Badger,” which backs his remarkable chops, inventive melodies, and clever harmonics with magical Eastern drones.
And it seems The Tea Party had some friends in high places, because folk legend Roy Harper (famously name-checked on Led Zeppelin III’s “Hats off to (Roy) Harper”) provides a delightfully dramatic recitation for a nameless, hidden track at album’s end.
Call me crazy, but the older I get, the better all this sounds!
But, in its time, The Edges of Twilight saw sluggish sales across much of the globe, even as it was turning The Tea Party into genuine stars in their native Canada, where it reached No. 11 and went on to earn double platinum status, Juno nominations, etc.
Not being ones to sit on their laurels, however, the ever-questing trio made a hard pivot towards electronics for 1997’s less satisfying Transmission, and then saw fine subsequent efforts like ‘99’s Triptych, ‘01’s The Interzone Mantras and ‘04’s Seven Circles criminally ignored beyond Canadian borders.
Oh, well, I still love them.
p.s. -- This cover art features a sculpture created by William Wetmore Story for the grave of his wife Emelyn, known as the The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life, and found in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (as well as the cover of the Nightwish album Once).
More Tea Party: Splendor Solis, Transmission.
