Love Food Sex Peace

Love Food Sex Peace review by Brett Milano, OffBeat Magazine, Feb. 2014 Bas Clas sound like a lot of things on this seven-song mini-album-punk, Celtic, alt-rock and Cajun. What they don't sound like is a band that originally formed in 1976. And since the CD package doesn't provide a close-up photo of the band, you can be forgiven for thinking that it's a bunch of young whippersnappers making this music. That's especially true on the opening "Today We Hang John Brown," the kind of punked-up traditional stomp that the Dropkick Murphys (and for that matter, latter-day Springsteen) took to the bank. Lead singer/main writer Donnie Picou specializes in sweeping story-songs, his characters are either trapped in desperate circumstances or (on "Little Italy") swept away on romantic ones, but their lives aren't boring. His gruff voice is well suited to these tales, and the band doesn't take the obvious road on arrangements: "Lost Caravan" sports a metaphorical lyric that equates life's uncertainty with a slog through the desert; the band offsets the lyric's heaviness by making it a rousing pub-rocker with a few hints of Costello's "Red Shoes." The only gripe with this disc is in the sequencing, as they bury the catchiest and most lighthearted track "My Friends" at disc's end and stick the epic, should've-been-finale "Goodnight" toward the front.