A year ago Saturday, Tacoma garage-rock legends, The Sonics, showed us they still had it with a fierce, swaggering set at Seattle's Paramount Theatre, their first local performance since the Nixon administration.

And as this Halloween approaches there's more Sonics news that's so good it's scary. Lead howler Jerry Roslie tells me his band is close to finishing four new songs with Seattle super-producer Jack Endino.

The new song titles are "Bad Attitude," "Vampire Kiss," "Cheap Shades" and "Don't Back Down," Roslie told me this afternoon. And though he's not sure exactly how they will be released at this point, he said there has been talk of putting them out as an EP with a full-length album to follow down the road.

Regarding the new sounds sound: “We didn’t want to abandon our original style, but yet we didn’t want to seem as though we were stuck in that either. So it’s kind of like the Sonics now, I guess.' ... We’re trying to sound more forceful, like with more energy and (more) explosive, maybe ... than we were."

Jokingly he added, "We definitely didn’t want to go the other way and slow down, like we’d all be getting chairs on stage and music stands or something. We haven’t unplugged yet.”

But, hey, why not hear it from the man himself? Click this link to listen to a clip from my latest interview with Roslie, who will join his band on another trek across Europe next month.

Categories: General TRC
Tags: garage-rock, interview, Jack Endino, Jerry Roslie, Northwest legends, rock, Seattle, sound bites, Tacoma, The Sonics