Leave Your Leather On, the blistering debut album from Brooklyn-based garage punk trio
Call of the Wild, may clock in at a mere 23 minutes, but it certainly burns up its share of calories along the way. Steeped in the old-school, pick slide-happy attack of bands like
Fear,
Cro-Mags,
Misfits, and
the Stooges while maintaining a solid backbone of classic New Wave of British Heavy Metal-inspired brutality, Leave Your Leather On is so old-school that you can almost smell the metallic, chemical bouquet of the just-opened cassette tape. No-frills punk rock is a hard thing to pull off in the digital age, but guitarist Johnny Coolati, bassist Max Peebles, and ex-
Awesome Color drummer Allison Busch have made an awfully good stab at it.
Call of the Wild may not have anything groundbreaking to say, but they go ahead and scream it loud as fuck anyway, and that tenacity allows standout cuts like the combustive opener "Autobahn" (not a
Kraftwerk cover) and the Necros meets
Mommy's Little Monster-era
Social Distortion anthem "All th' Lessons" to get by on just attitude alone. That said, it's nearly impossible to listen to Leave Your Leather On without hearing the ghosts that inspired it, as it's a veritable CliffsNotes of classic punk and metal. "Crack the Whip" flirts with
Piece of Mind-era
Iron Maiden before descending into
Buzzcocks/
Black Flag territory; "NY Ripper," which is about exactly what you think it is, finds the trio slicing up the Big Apple's courtesan population in full-on
Suicidal Tendencies/
Motörhead mode; and "It's Your Night!" wraps things up with the kind of mosh pit-worthy, middle finger raised, anti-authority hymn that could raise CBGB back from the netherworld. ~ James Christopher Monger