Gygax - Second Edition (Creator-Destructor Records)

Inveterate Thin Lizzy-worshippers Gygax return with a second album, cunningly entitled Second Edition, and, rather gratifyingly – or depressingly, if you’re of an opposite mindset to mine – there’s no letup in the twin-guitar mayhem.

In fact, if anything, the guitars of Bryant Throckmorton and Jeff Potts are even more gloriously seventies in tone and feel this time round. Augmented by sassy horns on the quite superb Song of the Silver Hands, the Gygax sound is transferred to the Floridian swamps circa 1974 with surprisingly edifying results. This is a band that knows it’s classic rock far beyond the pubs and rehearsal rooms of Dublin and London around 1976.

Thin Lizzy were one of the great storytelling bands of their time – nobody peopled his band’s world with the sort of silver-tongued chancers of Chinatown and Johnny the Fox quite as well as Phil Lynott – and it’s pleasing to see that Gygax recognise that it’s this gift of the tale that’s just as important as twin guitar harmonies and rolling barrages of syncopated drum thunder. Thus the song Wish is a great example of Gygax taking on the whole task of recreating the Lizzy sound, not just the obvious bits.

The addition of some clanging keys at the start of final track Second Wind gives the track a bit of a Scandi-feel a la The Gloria Story (remember them? They did a song about a character named, obviously ‘Valentino’), but it too ends up as a Gorham/Robertson freak out, meaning that if you can take or leave Thin Lizzy you’re not really going to find much here to get excited about.

But for the rest of us more normally-aspirated people, people for whom involuntary bursts of air guitar have been a way of life for decades, this album is about as much fun as it’s possible to have without being broken up by some sort of primitive matter transporter and sent back to 1980. Great stuff.