Here Are the Sonics

wow covers and distortion. ground breaking.......

Buen disco, me gusto, un clasico rock n roll

Enjoyable as a time capsule but the covers don't rise above the originals.

Doteraz som si myslel, že takto tvrdo hrali v tom čase len Kinks, počujem, že som sa mýlil... Je to fajn rock n roll. Celkom ma to bavilo.

Apparently a lot of songs I knew

не зашло.

Before now, I think my only exposure to the Sonics was reading about them in the intro paragraphs to "Seattle Scene" articles and books. This sounds basically exactly how I would have expected it to based on those descriptions, and it may sound crazy but listening now I can actually hear these guys' influence on bands like Mudhoney. (The vocalist sounding a lot like Mark Arm certainly adds to that.) This simultaneously sounds really old and yet ahead of its time.

The celebrated darlings of 60's Garage rock. Still cool.

Where's Escape From the City?

Garage rock band covers Motown. But this one is the first! And the singer sounds like proto-Danzig.

My kind of music. Old school rock and roll, punchy with proper raw vocals. The vocals reminded me a bit of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who I've come to love during this list. Really loved a lot of the guitar work throughout, some great covers too. Just a real feel good vibe throughout.

Annoying. Not very good, and a bunch of covers. 1 star on principle

Easy 5

Dated, but not past its expiration date yet. ★★★

Lot of energy and grit, especially in the vocals. But is a little repetitive and doesn't overly grab me as primarily a cover album. Rating: 4/10 (Below average) Favorite Song: Have Love Will Travel

Proto ska/punk/metal? Gritty as a sand sandwich and absolutely bouncing throughout. There may be several covers here, but the sonics really bring their sound to them. The vocals are fantastic, with screams aplenty. The rock and roll is played fiercely and the horns throughout add interest and punctuation. Less than 30 minutes of inspirational fire. 4*

When I lived in Nashville, I wasn’t a big fan of country music, and less of a fan of the Broadway bars full of bands covering country songs. This is the bopping rock version.

Very very charming, and my love for garage rock is carrying a lot of my enjoyment

Well, that’s the most American pronunciation of Tchaikovsky I’ve ever heard. Also, ok, we get it, you can hit a pretty good rock scream. It doesn’t need to be hit multiple times. Every. Fucking. Song.

putting the rock in rock n roll

Seattle Garage Rock from 65.

This album is the posterchild of Garage Rock. There may be better albums that share the influence, but none that represent the movement as well as this one. It is energetic and dynamic rock music, with clear highlights in Strychnine and Have Love Will Travel. It was significantly ahead of its time in how loud it sounds, and had a clear influence in music to come. 8/10 [KEEP]

Ko bi rekao da glupi jez takodje pravi i muziku. Impresivno je koliko je ovaj album najbliza reprezentacija konstipacije u audio obliku. 99% pesama je identicno, kao da slusam Slayer pre Slayera. Gotta give it to them tho, imaju citavu jednu slusljivu pesmu na celom albumu, al nadam se da nikad vise necu morati da cujem nesto sto su reprodukovali.

- sonics su vrh, ali je bas los kvalitet zvuka - generalno garage rock ima taj zvuk kao da je snimano u garazi - каква случајност <3

ма каки курац битлси

Sirovo, kratko, jasno Izdvajam: Money, Have love will travel, Roll over Beethoven

Ma bomba, Witch je najbolja pesma koju sam čula u poslednje vreme 10/10

Rating: 9/10 First listen: Yes Would listen again: Yes Fav track: I love them all Comment: Bangercinaaaaaaa

this album was a wonderful surprise!

This was an interesting album. It reminds me of what Bob Seger was trying to do in 1971–72, so I was surprised to learn it came out in 1965. I actually had to look up when Little Richard was releasing his music, and it turns out he had a seven-year head start on these guys. The influence is unmistakable, and this album feels like a tribute to his sound. What really struck me was that a relatively obscure band could put out an album this good. It made me think about the thriving live music scene in Washington at the time, where bands like The Sonics could build a devoted regional following without ever breaking into the mainstream. A reminder that some bands were absolutely killing it locally, even if the rest of the country barely knew they existed.

Yeah, I mean it's neat. Definitely interesting to see this raw garage rock sound so early, and placed on top of these old standards. I think this is clearly an influential album, if not for musical prowess, for sheer style and production. Not one that I would listen to often, but I think it's a valuable listen. The original tracks, though few, are very strong.

Raw 60s rock n’ roll - a few covers I recognised - an enjoyable listen

After listening to this, if only for a minute, I was willing to believe that the coolest thing you could possibly do is go down to the malt shop and crush some milkshakes with the boys. What a time to be alive.

A bit dated but still decent. Definitely has a vibe of very early punk.

Much better than I expected. It's still strongly rooted in early rock'n'roll, but you can already feel a very different kind of energy begining to emerge. The arrangements are quite basic and the whole thing still feels pretty raw, but that is precisely what makes its charm in my opinion. Back in 1965, this must have felt rough and aggressive compared to the more polished pop-rock acts that were popular at the time. The horns sometimes sound like proto-ska, and the hits like Strychnine are bangers. Too many covers to deserve a 4*, but it still made for a nice soundtrack to wake up while sipping my morning coffee. I might even give it another spin one day. 6/10

Rockabilly Rock'n roll with a a raucous sound, overdrive guitar and raucaus singin. No choir boys.

The whole Seattle alternative rock scene cites The Sonics as a massive influence, but I’d never really listened to them properly. Well, now I have, and wow… This is 1965, and it’s already punk! The opening track, The Witch, is particularly ahead of its time in terms of rythmic. I’m not too crazy about the covers, but the original songs are all inspired, incredibly energetic, raw and dirty. The sax solo on Boss Hoss absolutely kills, and Strychnine is fantastic. I can definitely hear the influence on The Stooges. Putting this album into its historical context, I really dig it!

Awesome!

Fun album with some good songs. Short, but a classic. 4/5

The amount of screaming on some of these songs is actually starting to get on my nerves, lol. I really want to say it was fine, even alright at times, but holy shit the amount of screaming and how annoying it got actually sent me over the edge. I feel like I have to say 2 because the music without the screaming is actually enjoyable, but wow.

6.5/10

The Witch - 78 Do You Love Me - 82 Roll Over Beethoven - 79 Boss Hoss - 77 Dirty Robber - 78 Have Love, Will Travel - 85 Psycho - 82 Money - 81 Walkin' The Dog - 76 Night Time Is The Right Time - 83 Strychnine - 75 Good Golly, Miss Molly - 78 Here Are The Sonics!!! - 79

Contains the following classic: "Do You Love Me". 60s a bunch. A good energy.

No private session used for Spotify. We are doing cover bands now? It's fun and raw(read crappy recording), but I am pretty sure I could go out on Tuesday night and find this. A dive bar is better setting for this music than this list. Screams are getting on my nerves, the more I listen this album the more I disrespect 1001 albums to hear before you die.

Pretty decent cover band

Boringassbeatles Honestly, this album contributes NOTHING. Maybe, just maybe, there aren't 1001 albums I need to hear before I die. Maybe there are only 100. Or 10.

Fun enough. 3.

I really want to like it but truthfully the best bits are covers of other greats, their stuff is just kinda garage band stuff, and by garage band I mean the kind of band that every 16 year old formed in the 1960s after hearing the Beatles and wanting to be them- but very very few ever did. These guys are no exception. Plus 1 for nostalgia and the rawness of it all.

Золотой стандарт в своем жанре

Yeah, it's mostly a bunch of covers, but these guys rock. Favorite Songs: The Witch, Strychnine

Forever immortalised as the LV advert song

Fantastic energy, you can hear the influence on bands like The Stooges and many others. Have Love Will Travel is the stand out but every track is great. Didn't realise they made them like this in 1965 3.5/5

I love modern music but when bands are this tight without quantization or a click track - it just feels different. They're very much in sync but there's also a looseness within it. This may be one of my favorite records from the mid 60's. I mean I love a lot of these records but this - well this is the most Beatles-esque. It's a direct precursor to rock music. It was normal for the time, so I don't wanna ding them for doing all covers - they do them great - but I'm curious if they ever wrote their own music. Definitely a great album - definitely worth the listen.

It's a solid album with lots of covers, but I appreciate the lead singer's voice on their original material. It's not quite as perfect. Little grainy and gritty. I'd be interested to see where they went after this.

Very nice album. Sad that there is no remastered one available.

Huh!! I didn’t know exactly what to make of it at first but i kinda got it by the end and it was a pretty cool time!

This is super upbeat noisy rock n' roll fun. Especially given the year of release, this is real cool. I love the dirty guitar and the rough and ready production. There's plenty of other driving instruments in there, including the manic rock n' roll keys and that filthy sax. I came into this album liking one of the songs already (Have Love Will Travel) so it was good to listen to the rest of the album. I really like their style, but you have to dock points for the sheer number of covers right? I know it was the thing at the time, but there are 8 (!) covers on here out of 12. Just 4 original songs. Regardless of the covers though I am DIGGING a lot of this. 3.5 rounded up - YAAAAAAOW!

Um… this needs to stay in the crate. Or get pulled by someone who is going to sample it for its useful bits if they’re there. The covers were done better by the original artists or someone else, and the originals just don’t get off the ground, for me. 2 - for garage effort, which hey, awesome, do it yourself. But really this is a 1. Boolean: FALSE

I love screaming in songs as much as the next person, but all the shouting with the distortion was just too much for me

I feel like I just listened to the same exact song on a loop. Very tiring.

Hard to get past the terrible distortion, I know it's a garage band thing, but it wasn't great to listen to in the car.

Big energy 60s garage rock. This was fun

Hear of the Sonics but now actually listened. Enjoyed this very much! 4/5

Favorite Track: Have Love Will Travel

Rating: 4.7/5 Short Review: This thing sounds fucking feral. Dirty guitars, screaming vocals, pounding drums. It barely feels like 1965. You can hear punk and garage rock waiting to happen. Short, raw, and ridiculously fun. Favorite Track: Strychnine

He loves that scream. Ahead of their time.

Sigh. I can never decide if I like The Sonics or not. This doesn’t help their cause

This is born of an era when there were so many covers of songs that you never were sure who did the original. And this album is full of possible covers. But they are done well, and the album as a piece of work is decent. I enjoyed listening this, though its not sn outstanding album. If this is your era or genre you'll love this album. For me its high 3, but not quite worth a 4.

!!!And the award for the most badly done cover versions goes to…..!!! Now I’ve always disliked any song that has a prescribed dance that absolutely must be done by everyone whilst grinning inanely, so this will be filed alongside Agadoo-doo-doo, Let’s to the time warp and YMCA.

The Sonics were highly influential in using groundbreaking techniques and style to create their garage sound. Cutting holes in your amplifiers to make that fuzzy gain effect = genius! The only problem is there are just too many cover versions of old songs that have dated badly 'Roll Over Beethoven' being a good example. But with their own material like 'The Witch' or 'Strychnine' things work better for me at least. Not bad. But not great either.

So much better than I expected, but it's still a bit annoying that it seems like the entirety of the 50s and most of the 60s is just people remaking the same 15-20 songs. Still, this is very scream-y and funny and pretty fun for a 60s album. 3.5

God I love this record. The energy, the bombast, the controlled chaos of the sound. Lineage of the music produced from this album is very much My Shit™

Good fun but too reliant on covers to be a great album.

If I wanted to listen to covers I would go to a karaoke bar

Real boss hoss

Day998 - garage rock with a little saxophone. yes please. i think every sixties band was contractually obligated to cover roll over beethoven. i hope chuck berry got his money

It’s kinda crazy how much rock in the 60s was just rip offs and covers of Motown. Points for the crusty g garage rock sound I guess, and it’s blissfully short- but why only 4 original songs out of 12? You’re not an artist at that point. Just a jukebox band. ⭐️⭐️.5

Rating: 4/10

Interesting cover versions. The singer is great at those rock 'n' roll shouts. Unfortunately, the songs do start blending together a bit halfway through

I think that if I had been around in Tacoma, Washington in 1965 then The Sonics may well have been one of my favourite bands. They’re scrappy, in your face, but most importantly of all it sounds like they’re just having a damn good time playing a bit of garage rock and roll. The recording is pretty basic, played live in the studio on a primitive two track recorder with every VU meter bouncing into the red. It’s mostly covers of old favourites but there are some original numbers that stand comparison with the classics, especially The Witch, with stomping drums and screaming vocals from front man Gerry Roslie. They may not have hit the big time, but by all accounts they had a solid local following in the Pacific north-west and a legendary reputation that persisted all the way up to Nirvana in the 90s and beyond.

These guys should have been a 90s band, not a 60s band. The lyrics for "Walkin' the Dog" are the verses from "Miss Mary Mack" so that's kinda fun! Wonder how that evolved!

Way ahead of its time

3/5

This is pretty fuckin raw. It's a band playing well and they're tich' (Scottish for tight). Played and recorded live or at least it sounds like that. Some great covers and Boss Hoss is a fantastic original cut. Not bad lads, not bad.

Straightforward early / garage rock.

Good old-fashioned 60s rock, sort of a combination of CCR and the Kinks. None of the tracks exceed 3 minutes in length, something pretty common in 1965 but still much appreciated by a modern listener. The singing is soulfully carefree, sporting plenty of rock screams and voice breaks that work pretty well with the song. The Witch picks out a riff and hammers it home across a variety of blues and blues-adjacent chords. Great fast bassline too, and I think I hear a sax way back in the mix. Then Do You Love Me bursts onto the scene – a standard yet bombastic call-and-response song with a surprisingly high level of distortion for the time. I can't imagine that was intentional. It could really do with a remaster. Those drums, especially, completely blow out the mix whenever Roll over Beethoven (yep, the "over" isn't capitalised for whatever reason) is very much in line with whichever version you've heard previously. Berry's original, the Beatles, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis... In the Sonics' version, the guitar intro, the solo, the melodies, the tempo – they're all what you're used to. (The key feature here is the addition of rock piano.) But because all those old versions are so iconic, this one inherits some of the star power, and I can't bring myself to dislike it. Who the bliddy is Boss Hoss? He ain't any boss I've ever heard of. Still, a fun fast-paced number that blends in with the crowd. Dirty Robber is much the same, closely following a blues progression and including plenty of distorted screams. Akin to I'm Down, Long Tall Sally, and probably thousands of other blues compositions prior to that point. Side 1 concludes with Have Love Will Travel, whose popularity is entirely justified by that fantastic guitar riff. Psycho reminds me of Uptight (Everything's Alright), if only because of that pesky melody. Great little tune. Tons of gusto in the vocal performance here. Very different to Muse's version of Psycho, which I think I like a little more. A key change near the end provides us a stereotypically exciting song ending. Next we get Money, another song the Beatles (among many others) also covered. This one I think I prefer over the Beatles' version, if only because the riff actually bothers to shift in accordance with 12-bar blues. Walkin' the Dog... yeah, standard blues. The only things that brings it barely above average are those backing vocals and the goofy whistling (at the dog) near the end. The version of Night Time Is the Right Time I'm most familiar with is CCR's version, so there's another resemblance factor in the books. Again the backing vocals carry the song. Strychnine, a word I had to look up, is both a toxic compound and a pretty solid song. There's an intriguing chord – I think it's IIIb – inserted into the standard I-IV-V progression that grants the sound a lot more oomph. Finally, Good Golly Miss Molly... well, you all know it. It's a great song, covered hundreds of times so as to dramatically diminish its value. 3/5 Key tracks: The Witch, Have Love Will Travel, Psycho

The Sonics are one of those bands that you have to evaluate in the context of their time. If a band sounded like that today, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But recording a song like “The Witch” in 1965 is certainly remarkable. At that time, popular music was still largely stuck in the folk genre, and bands like The Who sounded accordingly. Sure, “Here Are The Sonics” otherwise consists mainly of unspectacular cover versions, but I do see the disruptive power of their original songs as a key factor in how we evaluate them in retrospect.

YEAOWW!!

Classic diner music (I liked it)

As exciting as this album is, i just imagine this dude's voice hurt after performing.

Lots of covers but great sound, especially for the era. Love the following songs: The Witch, Do You Love Me, Have Love Will Travel.

Some pretty wild stuff here on a fun album I had never heard of. Sometimes the 1001 album list actually does what I hoped it might! A very raw-sounding garage band with very rudimentary song-writing skills but a great instinct for picking rock classics to cover. I'm guessing this is something like the Beatles sounded circa 1959.

Whenever I’m craving some raw, old-school garage rock with a proto-punk vibe, The Sonics are always a go-to for me, right alongside The Seeds. This album is as straightforward as garage rock gets, but it’s incredibly raw with awesome energy and angst. I can only imagine what it must’ve felt like to hear this when it first came out, especially within the context of the early to mid-60s culture.

Loud as fuck. I can hear how this must’ve influenced some of the more contemporary music I’ve listened to. Enjoyable stuff but it kind of all blends together after a while. 7/10

Lekker hysterisch en best wel leuk. Maar ook heel veel t zelfde dus puntje aftrek. Maar wel heel leuk.

8/,5010 Buen album, me hizo acordar mucho a Elvis. Movido, muy bueno

Never heard of these guys, pretty good for 1965. Solid influence of Jerry Lee Lewis, the scratchy screams, piano. Was that a kazoo in the band? Guitar and drums solid. Curious what they sounded like years later. Most of the songs were covers. 3 stars

Demasiadas versiones. Tienen energía pero no los considero geniales. Un grupo para el directo.

They manifest the spirit of rock and roll as well as any band. And given their importance to the continuum of the Seattle music scene, and its importance to the history of post-WWII music, they definitely belong on the list. But listening to them is exhausting. There's only so much screaming and compressor overload I can take.

Solid garage rock. Enjoyable.