Formed in Boston in the late 70s out of the ashes of the legendary DMZ, Lyres are one of the truly essential bands of 1980s garage and their fierce debut from 1984 has been a benchmark for the genre since then.

On Fyre is a royal succession of unstoppably great selections, all with inventive use of major/minor chord switches, ear-bending tremolo gear, and/or relentless in-motion rhythmic sequences – sometimes all at once. Home base for Lyres, nearly always, has been Boston, Massachusetts, where the majority of the group’s early personnel had already experienced a pretty strong taste of group life, having played a major part in one of the foremost punk-era outfits the city had earlier thrown up; they were, of course, the legendary DMZ, mighty fine purveyors of rock’n’rollin’, R&B-derived high-velocity pop action. Both DMZ and Lyres were spearheaded by lead vocalist, organ/piano player and tambourine-basher extraordinaire Jeff Conolly, whose own individual performances have a direct lineage that can be traced back to the unbridled abandonment displayed by none more so than the legendary Jerry Lee Lewis. That the raw sonic exultations captured throughout On Fyre were unleashed almost thirty years ago now is quite an astonishing, terrifying statistic given that, in the here and now reality of March 2012, it’s a record that still sounds as fresh, bold, new and exciting as it did back in 1984. That’s the beauty of Lyres too, their non-applicableness to feeble time constraints. The fact that they didn’t, and still don’t, care one iota for any tawdry musical fads and fashions that come and go, serves to illuminate their timeless appeal to rock’n’roll fans and practitioners.