Judging by The Len Price 3’s latest you’d think the late ‘70s never ended.
Steeped in some of the best influences The Who, The Clash and The Kinks have to offer, this UK-based trio have turned in one solid garage/punk pop album after another and “Kentish Longtails” is more of the same…. And that is far from being a bad thing. One of the appeals of the band is that they never shy away from wearing their influences on their sleeves.
Their fifth album comes three years after “Nobody Knows,” and proves to be well worth the wait. Songs like “Telegraph Hill,” with sweet harmonies, sounds like a lost track off “The Village Green Preservation Society,” “Nothing I Want” is pure Clash, while “Saturday Morning Film Show,” sounds like one of the earliest incarnations of garage pop. And they manage to pull this off without sounding like a cover band, adding in plenty of their own quirks and touches to the music.
Over the years, thanks to a slew of middle class suburban American kids who spent more time at Hot Topic than practicing in the garage, “pop punk” has congealed into a generic term for any mediocre band that owns a distortion pedal and grew up with a Blink 182 poster on their wall. The Len Price 3 is finally restoring the genre to it’s rightful place.
The Len Price 3 – Kentish Longtails/14 tracks/JLM Recordings/2017 / http://www.thelenprice3.co.uk/