Johnny Cage and the Voodoo Groove “Spirit Animal Superstar Signals From The Electric Boneyard”

We just knew that we had to review this album when we read the band’s bio and it described their sound as “Raunch & Rumble music, strictly for those who wanna Bump n’ Grind & lose their mind! From festivals to house parties, halls to pubs, clubs to boudoirs everywhere”. Now if that’s not a description that gets your juices flowing then you’re probably following the wrong site!

The first thing we took from this album is that we’re damn sure that Johnny Cage and the Voodoo Groove are a great act to see live. Songs like “Human Remains”, “Superman iii” and “Better Off Left Alone” are just really great rock n roll songs. Clearly they have a rockabilly influence but also with a bit of added pure rock to give them a kick.

However, they don’t get stuck in one style. On “3 Brass Monkeys”, the emphasis on the sax gives it a more soulful feel. When you get to the swaggering, Latin feel of “Jockey Full Of Bourbon” or the New Orleans flavour of “Charlie Jones”, you are in a similar territory as the awesome Urban Voodoo Machine.

They also seem like a band that are committed to having fun. You get the nice touch of slipping in a bit of Eurythmics on “Before (Sweet Dreams)”. Often that sense of fun is kept going by just delivering simple songs made to make a crowd get up and jumping, such as “Well, Well, Well” and “Got It All Wrong”.

On first listen, it might be easy to dismiss this as ‘just another’ rock n roll/rockabilly album. But it offers more than that. All we need to do is find out where Johnny Cage and the Voodoo Groove will be playing live near us so we can check them out. As the band themselves say on this album, “everyone loves rock n roll”.