Ah, _The Hustler_ by Human Instinct—now that’s a record with some real grease under its nails, the kind of album that never had a shot at going platinum but never gave a damn either. It’s got that rough-around-the-edges groove, the sound of a band that played its heart out in smoky bars where the beer was cheap and the crowds were rowdy.
Human Instinct, those New Zealand rockers, had that fuzz-drenched, blues-soaked energy, a sound that could have been born in the backseat of a beat-up muscle car with the radio stuck between a Hendrix jam and some outlaw country. _The Hustler_ came out in the mid-’70s, by which time rock and roll had already started polishing its boots for the stadiums, but these guys? They stayed raw, kept it grimy, played like they still had something to prove.
You put on a track like “Mae West and My Gangster Hero,” and you can feel the swagger of a band that knew how to walk that fine line between tight musicianship and loose, reckless abandon. “Funky Monkey” struts in with a bassline that’s too cool to care, and the title track, “The Hustler,” moves like a back-alley deal—smooth but dangerous.
This is the sound of a band that worked for it, that lived for the moment when the amps got hot and the groove got mean. It’s the kind of record you find in a dusty crate in the back of some forgotten shop, slip onto the turntable, and suddenly, you’re somewhere else—somewhere wilder, somewhere freer, somewhere that smells like gasoline, leather, and rain.
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