The amazing UK Groundhogs [limited time only package]

Love the comic strip cover for "Who will save the world"...

I have to admit I never heard these guys before until quite recently.  I absolutely love this kind of hard-driven guitar-based rock with progressive touches, like Sandoz long ago did so well, or the great High Tide, insane asylum escapees Gnidrolog, or my favourite, hard rocker turned preacher, Steinblast. This is totally up my alley and I would give a kidney to find more like this every month to keep me fully entertained until the apocalypse.

Discography here.

They began relatively inauspiciously with blues rock in their first 2 albums, Scratching the Surface (1968), and Blues Obituary (1969), you couldn't have expected anything else really, but then by Thank Christ in 1970 at the magical and miraculous turn of that decade they blew the blues out of the water with some absolutely incomparable progressive riffs and passages, still very much blues-based but so much more creative than the average stuff.

Consider from Thank Christ, Eccentric Man, with its highly eccentric riff:

Even though this is an E-based song (as the majority of them are in rock history), after the initial riff note how the verse goes up to the tritonal B flat before going back down to the riff.

To say I almost had a heart attack when I heard the insanity of this is to play down the out of body experience.

And then it just never lets up through album after album of hard electric guitar and craziness.

Junkman, from the remarkable Split:

That riff is totally insane, technically speaking it uses whole tones in the first part and the blues scale in a different key for the 2nd, a jarring combination I don't think I've ever heard someone do before. In fact, musically, the whole tone scale is the diametric opposite of the blues scale which is based on chromatic or really bent notes.

Fulfilment, from Crosscut Saw:

Check out the really odd chords he gets out in this song. Sounds a lot like the most inventive late 90s alternative stuff, or like Nirvana did in their best (most progressive) moments eg Insecticide.

Even the late 1984 album Razors Edge has some interesting material. Setting aside those first two anomalies,  a solid seven wonderful albums with so many progressive riffs and weird ideas to enjoy.

One thing I detest is the misogyny that permeates so many of the lyrics, cf. "I love Miss Ogyny." I understand that in that song he is making fun of the first person singer, but it's nonetheless disturbing especially given the other songs with similar ideas. I mean, most people think Led Zep were the same, a common reason females say they hate the band (although there are so many reasons for girls to hate them), so you have to accept it's a part of this era / the blues.

As I've said before though, I grew up with Led Zep and alternative rock so this stuff is like discovering a foothold in heaven.

I would love to get your opinions on this material.  Has everyone already heard these records and loved them?

To me it was such a shock to find something so up my alley that I never heard before.