|
JAKE VEGAS
|
|
It’s
thumping tribalistic mixture of Beefheart leading the Rio carnival, Red
Krayola’s bad-trip freeform freak-outs, Bauhaus sound-checking ‘Dancing’
and early Spacemen 3 bootlegs (‘Your Red Shoes’) does, by some feat of
controlled chaos, end up working. Sure, ‘Naked Kiss’ sounds
like a pick-up band trying to follow Chuck Berry at one of his notorious
gigs where he decides not to tell the band what the fuck he’s doing,
ending up resembling Oliver Reed stomping around pissed and pantless on
Parkinson. As messy as Operation Market Garden and overall too much of a
car-crash soundtrack to bizarro cartoons like ‘Ren and Stimpy’ (not in
itself a bad thing!) and scattershot to be anything other than interesting
as opposed to being necessary...The frenzied jazzy-space-bop skronkin’
opuses of ‘Zydeco Mama’ and ‘The Jakester’ are
so Royal Trux they swing through Saturns rings with Sun-Ra. I was half
expecting Julian Cope to canter in and start holding court about henges
and pagan lords...’Black Girl’ would, in say the
hands of blues-bestializer John Schooley, be an absolutely barn building,
hurricane withstanding song, but toss that roach and roll another that and
‘Big White Dues’ lose little going headlong down overgrown
dirt-tracks of rusty rockabilly to a haphazard little shack where spindly
SS doctor-a-like Bill Burroughs injects insect repellent into eager Hazel
Adkins and Lux n’ Ivy Cramp. Verily, more ‘Naked Lunch’ than ‘Naked Kiss’
be this wild at heart trip and glide. “Get up and dance you sweet perfume
fungus” indeed! |
|
-Stu Gibson |
Mr Vegas,
resident DJ of London’s swingingest club Lady Luck, here takes a
delightfully skewed left-turn into some surrealistic swampland loaded with
acid made on a primus stove in Death Valley by David Lynch. A pristinely
primitive freeform prosody that’ll either strike you as Avedic avant-garde
genius or Peter and the Test Tube Babies attempting a change of direction
by doing a concept album centred on the journey of gris gris hoodoo voodoo
culture from its ancient African dark heartlands through Louisiana and Dr
John onto, to erm, London, whilst supping enough Guiness to floor The
Pogues and, yes, The Dubliners too.