The Fleshtones were not only the greatest garage rock revivalists of the 1980s, they were the greatest garage rockers of all time. They drew from the best parts of The Yardbirds, The Kingsmen, The Sonics, The Seeds, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Rolling Stones, etc. They borrowed from the old and created a monster of American rock music that lived up to the haughty "Super Rock" title they gave to their sound. They intensified everything but the sound: cool, anxiety, joy, and energy. Their first single, “American Beat” (1979), was as good as the greatest rave-up in 1960s garage rock, about the 60s garage rock, with a walls of reverb to keep disco out of the spotlight for good.
Roman Gods pushed the Fleshtones and all of the 1960s to a new level. Their super rock is perfectly imbued on the first masterpiece of the album, “The Dreg”, with the ultimate cool fuzz bassline (Jan-Marek Pakulski), a guitar that builds to a fever pitch, soaked in reverb (Keith Streng), with bits of percussion rattling off in all directions (Lenny Calderon) and a cool understated vocalist (Peter Zaremba) singing of a person searching for the meaning behind their intuition, moving forward in life with whatever they have. Their dreg works through these problems on “I’ve Gotta Change My Life”, “Stop Fooling Around”, and “Hope Come Back” driven by a tremolo guitar, deep basslines, joyous organ, raucous drums, harmonica flairs and bursts of guitar solos.
The second masterpiece, “The World Has Changed”, is paced with extremely aggressive drum rolls and syncopation, a guitar on the verge of erupting at every moment, and Zaremba’s harmonica and feverish vocals. “R-I-G-H-T-S” is the quintessential party rock taken from Dick Dale’s surf concerts with the spirit of the kids marching in ’68.
The third and ultimate masterpiece, “Let’s See the Sun”, beats the most exuberant surf rockers without a guitar solo, replaced by Zaremba’s mournful harmonica; it is lyrically in the vein of “The Dreg” but the sun is the one that is “rising higher and higher,” not the girl, “on [and for] everyone” to give hope to the dregs of the world for brighter possibilities.
“Ride Your Pony” is a great rearrangement of the original soul version with a sitar guitar line like the Yardbirds “Heart Full of Soul”. Of the two instrumentals, “Chinese Kitchen” is a really good interlude with all of the best moments of the band summarized in two minutes, but it is “Roman Gods” that is the fourth masterpiece of the album. Syncopated rhythms abound, effervescent saxophones, stuttering guitars, and a frenzy of “sha, la, la, la, la” calls and responses for the world to sing and dance to under the sun, pushing beyond the shadowline to make the world a better, brighter place, which may never happen because of one song or party, but that will not stop the Fleshtones from trying to climb higher and higher with that ideal.
Pere Ubu was tangentially another “garage rock revivalist,” but they were much more of the avant-garde of their “Avant Garage” label they gave to journalists. The Fleshtones were all garage rock without any qualms of being original; they were just better than what they started with. They would go on to produce many more albums with in their super rock style, but nothing as exhilarating as Roman Gods. The next serious "garage rock revival" in the 2000s was an infantile joke compared to what these guys conjured up.
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