Heavenly Blue: Demo cassette

It should come as no surprise to those that know me that I have deep love for raw and fuzzed out garage rock from the 1960’s. Comps like Back From The Grave, Nuggets, Pebbles, Before Birdmen Flew etc are staples in my collection next to hundreds of 45s from the same era. While this type of music has never had much of a foothold in the maritimes, I’d always remained hopeful that a group would come along to change all that. Enter Heavenly Blue, a new Nova Scotian band featuring a few of the Booji Boys (and another gent with some ties to the Sewercide story if you look back far enough) that has been pounding out some excellent subterranean 60’s style garage punk that to me, sounds like the Dead Boys covering some of your favourites from the above mentioned Back From The Grave comps. With a band as exciting as this, we just had to offer to release their demo tape and lucky for us, the gents said yes. Set to be out in May 2021 and limited to 80 pro-manufactured cassettes, these will go quick.

Our take: Sewercide Records brings us more underground music from Canada’s Maritimes region. Given its regional focus (and a sparsely populated region, at that), Sewercide’s catalog is marked by stylistic diversity and a list of members that overlaps heavily between projects, and that pattern holds with Heavenly Blue. Heavenly Blue features members of Booji Boys (who also released a record on Sewercide) and they’re inspired by the big riffs, catchy choruses, and party vibes of 60s garage rock. It’s not as retro sounding as something like the Ar-Kaics, though; they sound more like the 60s-inspired / retro end of the 90s garage revival, and if they’d been a band 30 years ago, they’d be a shoe-in for a record on Sympathy for the Record Industry or Crypt. The recording is raw and nasty, the singer growls as much as he sings, and the songs are catchy and fun. Budget rockers, garage turkeys, and total punkers can all find something to like in Heavenly Blue.