Urge Overkill: Jesus Urge Superstar; Americruiser (both Touch & Go/All formats)

IF YOU were wondering what Chicago's strutting cockerels of flame-grilled dude-rock were doing before last year's acclaimed Saturation opus, the answer is in these two reissued albums. And the evidence establishes beyond contradiction that although their current medallion-flashing lounge lizard persona was a gradual mutation away from their mid-'80s scene contemporaries, the musical bedrock of the King/Kato axis has remained strikingly consistent: rigid, gritty, endlessly repeated urban blues riffs form the core, shot through with hard-boiled lyrics utterly devoid of irony and dripping with testosterone.