Attila & The Huns - Hard To Find In the underbrush of the already little-known garage world... I will look for other videos, but there’s little out there; I got the album, and it’s great...
The first thing that smelled rotten was that they had changed their name: the Unclaimed became the Huns, and Attila was their tyrant.
The second was that their album was released with fifteen tracks on CD and only thirteen on vinyl. Orphaned, therefore, not by two minor tracks but by something absolutely praiseworthy like It’s Raining Now and the extravagant surf of The Gull. After all, nothing is dispensable from the Unclaimed, so it’s a double slap in the face.
But how can this be, dear Shelley (Ganz, Kidd, or whatever the hell you want to be called), living locked in your golden cage renewing the perpetual cult of the Sixties, abhorring technology, and deciding to delegitimize vinyl?
The third thing was the decidedly horrible cover.
The fourth, Lee Joseph's name written backwards.
Nothing satanic, but nonetheless a portent of misfortune.
But who cares? When Under the Bodhi Tree is released, after five long years of waiting, the Huns are already dust, like their ancestors near the Nedao River more than a century and a half earlier.
Killed by themselves this time.
Devoured by their own captain.
This album thus remains a testament to the most enigmatic garage band of the Eighties, capable of putting on a circus where a psychotic beat like Hard to Find can coexist side by side with the dreamy arabesques of Well It’s True, the rattlesnakes of The Creep with the exceptional country ride of Bodhi Tree, the gentle tinkling of Betty Crooper with the cyclopean stride of Valley of the Giants, the carbon copy of Teeny Bopper, Teeny Bopper with the lethal Haunted. An album completely wrapped in the threads of the Sixties (the dark-folk of Music Machine, the instrumental and cinematic music, the raw energy of Count Five, the rebellious sound of Standells, the jangle-beat of Syndicate of Sound, the psychedelic punk of Chocolate Watch Band) but capable of unleashing its very own aroma, the scent of the most stylish retro-band of the entire underground garage.
