CD Review: Rog & Pip – Our Revolution

CD Review: Rog & Pip – Our Revolution

Rise Above Relics

All Access Rating: A-

Rog & Pip - Our Revolution 2014

Collecting dust no more, the recordings of Rog & Pip – guitarist Roger Lomas and singer/guitarist Pip Whitcher, once members of the U.K. freakbeat collective The Sorrows – are just now seeing the light of day.

Having followed the rest of The Sorrows to Italy in the late ‘60s, where the band was massively popular, Rog & Pip moved back to Britain in short order, repatriating to record loads of thundering psychedelic/progressive proto-metal and dirty-faced, stomping glam-rock at the ultra-modern AIR studios throughout the ‘70s. Lomas, who would become a Grammy-winning producer for The Specials, Echo and the Bunnymen, Roy Wood and The Tubes, just to name a few, saved it all, preserving it for this raucous and raw 12-track vintage collection of previously unreleased recordings. 

Housed in a deluxe package, from Rise Above Relics, with comprehensive sleeve notes and a passel of candid photos, rugged, rollicking songs like the spirited party anthem “A Little Rock ‘N’ Roll,” the rabble-rousing “Our Revolution” and the shaking, rumbling “Hot Rodder,” which predates the stoner-metal movement by a good 20 years or more, demand an audience. And although the songwriting is rudimentary, there’s a beautiful simplicity at work here, the Beatlesque “It’s a Lonely World” a bittersweet lament that hints at bigger ambitions, whereas “From a Window” and “Warlord” emerge as potent blasts of wild garage-rock that do, indeed, kick out the jams.

– Peter Lindblad