A Sophomore Album from Darkly Excellent Garage-Psych Sisters Good English

Darkly bristling, fearlessly individualistic all-female Ohio power trio Good English – guitarist Elizabeth, bassist Celia and drummer Leslie Rasmussen – are a blend of improbable but very good influences.

Good English’s self-titled sophomore album is streaming at Bandcamp. It opens with Carolina, a mashup of cantering fuzztone garage psych, surf rock, Black Sabbath and maybe Pat Benatar before she got all goofy. The tensely pulsing Girl comes across as the bastard child of the Detroit Cobras and the early Boomtown Rats. On the Run, with its minor keys and three-part harmonies, sounds like Pins covering the Go Go’s.

Awash in reverb and a hailstorm of cymbals, the murderously slinky Wanderer brings to mind a more stripped-down Desert Flower. Wicked Eyes starts out like the band might go in a lame corporate “R&B” direction but then veers toward Sabbath and then dark garage. The catchy Cold Winds swings along with four-on-the-floor drums and fuzztone bass, while Lion’s Kiss has the feel of a female-fronted, noisy Steve Wynn outtake from the early zeros.

The Fire Walk starts off much the same and then goes in an even more ominous direction, a surreal, twisted late-night party scenario. The album’s punkest track, Atheist is a slap upside the head of mindless belief. Battle Scar opens with a gentle unease and then hits a riff-rock stomp; the album winds up with Line of Fire, an uneasy ballad following a similar path upward out of uneasy jangle and resonance to a murky roar. This is music for people who like to carry a flask, probably own a turntable and lots of vinyl and live for hot nights in cramped little venues packed with like-minded revelers trying to keep it together until the real estate bubble finally bursts.