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“Would you give me up tomorrow,Would you give me up for Lent…”
– ‘Heaven
Sent’
 Thank God for these two poor Midlands maestros in sin that when they
mention electro in the same pallid breath as country and rockabilly, it
refers to the programmed beat not some abomination that would be shot in
the street, chain-sawed and run over ‘Scarface’ style. Thrice. After the
cosmic sample-Sigue Sigue surf of ‘Spooky Juice’ leaves the mangled
flotsam of Johnny Thunders old ‘Junior, Nick Cave’s bible, random smudged
pages of Elmore Leonard and Charlie Starkweathers boots business is got
down to behind Oriental blinds - verbal contracts negotiated in
hieroglyphics and veiled esoterica along hallways with no walls but
velveteen drapes that shroud the route to splendour or squalor,
clandestine organisations leaving clues amongst the detritus of motel
rooms Chas Ray Krider’s yet to photograph from a fevered page left-over
from ‘Naked Lunch’. Tickets don’t explode here, they’re torn into a
thousand pieces and morph into a ghoulish business card for the crooked
beat where those with the gnosis, guile and gumption are allowed to
manoeuvre their way in gratis. The flickering candle-light at a seance mix
of male and female voices, the silver screen-door sounds themselves -
slide guitars desperate with insolvency slip over spaghetti western riffs
and propel the band into a bar-room bolero beat - especially on
‘Cannonball’ and ‘Cheap Hotel’, like a frantic last minute escape onto the
window ledge and down the stairwell, whether from an illicit tryst, a
private eye, or the sinister slip of an askance mind are nothing if not a
faded paisley parchment of Nikki Sudden’s early ‘Waiting On Egypt’ and
‘The Bible Belt’ albums, not least those tracks such as ‘The Angels Are
Calling’ and ‘Missionary Boy’ where Lizard sings with old Nikki. The
psychotically nursery rhyme mantra of ‘Heaven Sent’ could be ventured into
by a young Mike Scott but is here portrayed in perfect near-disarray with
the forsaken three times fervour of Nick Cave on ‘The Mercy Seat’. There’s
an exhilarating sense of completion when all is hung and dried, a
culmination of literately cinematic complex characterisations leaving you
on tenterhooks that tilter and topple into a graveyard of tangled scarves.
An all too rare atmosphere is let out the cage, a brutally beautiful
theatricality evoking dark desires as equally as it does sweet un-censured
romance - as remote as it may be - and vicious urban decay as much as it
conjures a hideous voodoo-fevered noir. As simply as they straddle a
slipstream in the never-never land of where you shouldn’t be, they also
span a phantasmic chasm for the damn sinners of this land, and others
unchartered, and a couple consigned to the quagmire of theosophy and
twaddle.
In
short, sublime and siniciously stately. Whoever, whatever, the hell
this Red Coltrane is, or thinks they are presenting, they should by
sex, speed and an Andean shamans ability to suck his balls into his
nostrils present themselves to some German record labels.
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