Life Of Crime/You Can't Pray A Lie

The Laughing Hyenas's style didn't change much on their first three releases -- they just kept improving their formula, and Life of Crime was where they reached their peak. Three years after their debut, the Laughing Hyenas had become a frighteningly tight and powerful band; Kevin Strickland's thick but agile basslines merged with Jim Kimball's skull-crushing drumming to create a rhythm section whose brute force was on a par with their musical intelligence, and Larissa Strickland's sheets of blistering guitar work built rugged melodies from sonic chaos. And John Brannon's gale-force vocals presented punk rock dementia with a blues shouter's conviction which made his finest performances a truly disturbing thing to hear. Life of Crime strikes with the impact of a freight train on its first cut, "Everything I Want," and the thing never lets up for a moment; even the album's token slow song, "Outlaw," rains down fire and brimstone on the listener, and then-unknown producer Butch Vig gets the band's firepower on tape without compromise. By the time the Laughing Hyenas went back into the studio, Jim Kimball and Kevin Strickland had left the band, and the group began following a decidedly different direction (they probably had little choice), but Life of Crime rang down the curtain on their first era with an album that proved they were the most powerful Midwest band of their time. ~ Mark Deming