Sand is the duo of guitarist and songwriter Roy Swedeen and all-around poseur
Kim Fowley, and
The West Is Best is an album's worth of twangy garage rock that the terminally arch
Fowley compares to the work of
Merle Haggard and
Buck Owens. Naturally, it's not even close. The relatively unknown Swedeen is a capable though somewhat derivative songwriter with a passable gruff bar-band voice and some talent as a rough and ready guitarist. By far the best tracks are the three Swedeen-penned instrumentals, which are somewhere between
Dick Dale's reverb intensity and the soundtrack obsessions of early
Wall of Voodoo. By far the worst are
Fowley's four vocal showcases, the most excruciating by far being the spoken word "Desert Town" and the incoherent pseudopoetics of the title track. To be fair, the opening "Underground Garage" is a sweet tribute to
Steve van Zandt's garage-rocking radio show of the same name, but the rest of
The West Is Best suffers from
Kim Fowley's inborn pretentiousness.