4 out of 5 Stars!

Jerusalem Slim was a fun, short-lived band based in New York City featuring Mike Monroe and Sam Yaffa (Hanoi Rocks), Steve Stevens (Billy Idol/Atomic Playboys), and Ian McLagan (Faces) that released only a single album before vanishing.

As one might expect with this particular gang of musicians, the band played a style of music similar to (mostly) Hanoi Rocks. Yet with Stevens’s creative guitar prowess and sound effects on full display, with his solos and fills occasionally weird and mind-bending, the overall album is quite a bit heavier, with more polish and a brighter, rounder production quality than the aforementioned group ever had.

Nevertheless, vocalist Mike Monroe’s amusingly sassy, raucous, and punkish attitude is also here in abundance, and his wailing saxophone and harmonica pop up on occasion, so fans of Hanoi Rocks should certainly appreciate this obscure release as much as I do.

Punchy and energetic tunes such as “Teenage Nervous Breakdown,” “Lethal Underground,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Degeneration,” “Attitude Adjustment,” “Criminal Instinct,” and “Scum Live On” go for the throat and simply never let go in a sleazy, rebellious onslaught.

In a perfect rock ‘n’ roll world, Jerusalem Slim would have lasted much longer and issued more material…much more, damn it!

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