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 As anyone who’s driven through the desert will tell you, weird things grow
out there, like jackalopes and toads that squirt blood from their eyes.
Psychedelic bands are also part of the flora and fauna of the American
Southwest, it would seem, which makes sense – if you’ve got nothing but
blazing sun and dead, dry landscapes for miles around, chances are you’re
gonna want to pretty up your environment with some choice chemicals.
Tuscon’s Purple Merkins’ particular brand of poison sounds like either
windowpane acid or STP – anything grimy, volatile and unquestionably retro
to match their sound. A side project of the semi-legendary garage outfit
Marshmallow Overcoat (which is also enjoying a reissue from Dionysus), the Merkins offered a slightly grittier, more stripped-down approach to
’66-style acid raunch than their parent band, and from ‘92 through ‘97 or
so, they poured a fistful of recordings into the virgin earholes of the
local dirtbag populace, which caused them to strip naked en masse, paint
their faces in terrifying tribal patterns, and consume the contents of the
nearest medicine cabinet and rut in the streets like dogs in August. Those
vinyl sides have been disinterred and compiled for this CD release by
Merkin frontman and producer Timothy Gassen, and for those who didn’t get
to worship the moon gods at one of their shows, Merkinmania offers 19 cuts
of throbbing, oozing freakstomp that’s sure to have you mooning over
promotional 8x10s of Nancy Sinatra in The Wild Angels while all the good
people of the world are asleep. Cuts are divided between a solid selection
of Nuggets-y covers (The Seeds’ “The Wind Blows Your Hair,” The Monks’
“Higgle-dy Piggle-dy,” We the People’s “You Burn Me Up and Down”) and the Merkins’ originals, which are carved from the same heavy fuzz-and-organ
groove of the Standells/Chocolate Watchband/Shadows of Knights; said
originals are invested with enough R&B groove and fuzztone hipshake in
their patched-up jeans to make them stand tall next to the covers, which
is a mighty plus. If not every song hits the psilocybic peaks of “Get On
The Plane” (which has Gassen shrieking like Roky Erickson over a
sidewalk-thick slab of buzz spewing out the riff from “I Can Only Give You
Everything”) or the full-on Farfisa blitz of “She’s So Satisfyin’,” you’re
still not gonna come away from Merkinmania with just a contact high.
Gassen and Co. unleash a scream that crawls up the wall, and oh, baby,
they want you to touch it. All over. _______________________________________________________ |
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-Paul Gaita |