***1/2 Rolling Stone

A decade ago, songwriter and guitarist Joe Grushecky led the Iron City Houserockers, a band from Pittsburgh that played the most brutal, brainy brand of mainstream rock & roll imaginable yet never caught on in a commercial way.  Nearly a decade after the group's signature record Have a Good Time (But Get Out Alive), Grushecky has reemerged with a new group of Houserockers (only bassist Art Nardini and guest drummer Ned Ranking remain from the original unit) who help him put across his usual indictments about the crumbling relationships in a crumbling steel town with spirit, wit and ease.

Rock and Real is Grushecky's first release since his scathing 1984 single "Goodbye Steeltown", and it contiues in the same vein.  The characters in these eleven new tunes, all written or co-written by Grushecky, are of the down-and-out variety, but they're rarely romanticized.  The scrappy tales of a homeless Elvis fan ("Memphis Queen") and a junkie tossing tossing his last fix ("Unsafe at any Speed"), but the reconstituted Houserockers steamroll over most reservations.  Joe Grushecky, one of the more distinctive and unmuddied voices of Eighties American rock, has returned with his vision as precise and his passion as unquenced as they have ever been.

This is a major comeback:  Perhaps this time he'll get the broad audience he so richly deserves - Jimmy Guterman

ur ears in years.