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Southern
Culture On The Skids Suitably sizzling fifteen-strong set of frothing covers from the Nashville-baiting North Carolina natives ***
The Chelsea
Smiles
Fortunately for their avowed love of early KISS they don’t need to pad out the posing pouch halfway through to make the metaphoric, meteoric twelve inches. And any obvious Ace Frehley fantasties that are being lasciviously lived out are leched-upon with an equally lethal Walter Lure like New York ‘L.A.M.F.-ery-doo-dah’. Streamlined and sure-footed, filleted fatalistically, fully-formed and pretty much flawless, whether the first love exhilaration of ‘Pillbox’, the sneaky street sage assuaging his target with soft-focus choruses on ‘Heart Attack’ and ‘News For You’, both of which mix The Cult’s ‘Sonic Temple’ stadium bluster with cracked kerb-side savagery, not least in the Jimbo / Ian Raspberry vocals. Lean cuts of larceny be, literally, Damned for this Dead Boy resurrecting ceremony of diabolical drama would make Turbonegro’s Hank very happy indeed, and a whole lot of and more beside.
Thankfully human enough to lay off the aspects of engineering whilst allowing enough light in to illuminate certain angles, such as his son Morgan being sampled by Brian Eno during the making of Bowie’s Heroes album and the techniques employed in his ‘Berlin’ period. One of the highlights of the book, by the way, which is no disrespect to the author of such a fine tale, is that he once worked with a band suffering under the insanely genius-istic name of Omaha Sheriff, who must surely reform and reclaim some sort of mythical status. Another is the totally appropriate message for all us music nuts in the final chapter – ‘The business doesn’t have to be like this – originality and courage are what’s missing today’. Well said and unfortunately all too true.
He’s A
Rebel – Phil Spector: Rock’n’Roll’s Legendary Producer ‘…he had all the hardware a rock elder could want. Now if only he had a life’ – the author on Spector being awarded a Grammy ‘Nobody takes a gun from me’ – Spector to police during questioning after Lana Clarksons’ death
For the idly curious too, is the sinister coincidence that Clarkson’s death occurred on the anniversary of Buddy Holly and Joe Meek’s deaths (Meek being long cast as the English Spector), what corrupt astrology was catering that night? It is, unfortunately, an all too apt and tragically perfect ending for such a gruesome tale or power, paranoia, plummeting despair, pointless waste, oh, and a few pristine and premium slices of pop, soul and rock’n’roll all balanced on the hair-pin trigger finger of the spectral one himself. Bring on the court case and the third edition!
“I been
listening to the Womans Hour
The ambivalent frustrations of No Pussy Blues uses Spacemen 3’s Suicide as a template and leaves it spent and shaking in the corner tables tearing at it’s own torments, but being Nick Cave it’s not all cheap shots, schoolboy sniggering and man on the loose machismo. (I Don’t Need You To) Set Me Free combines a certain sardonic tenderness with a sultry bass line from the time before god created woman, where the wonderfully titled Depth Charge Ethel is a centrepiece for this exercise in literate carnality. Maybe not Cave’s best work, but a whole lotta whole lotta decadent fun is to be had here, ‘tis no mere pant-stained posse idly posturing that’s for sure, and it effortlessly ushers many so-called garage rock boys back into the bathroom to shave off their pathetic attempts at facial hair growth. Loose, leery, playful and ferally flirtatious. A wet ‘n’ wild wow factor rating of rather fucking good m’lud.
A curious broiling miasma that combines the epic Confederate battlefield trauma of Steve Earle at his most trenchant and twists it through the turmoil of love’s euphoria and effulgence, all the while wafting faint rancid reminisces of Placebo aside. While B-Side ‘Mobile Home’ doesn’t match this fine swirl it be my pleasure to announce that in this era’s futile obsession with the eighties, at last someone is adopting a few hits of the new-born giraffe gait of St Julian, the Holy Cope from his Teardrop Explodes and early solo album days. ‘Vultures Of The Soul’ has the lingering lonesome log-cabin woozy blues of Paul Westerberg sipping earnest tea with Billy Bragg. With ‘Submarine’ this strongly suggests that these war machines shouldnae be decommissioned but should be marched in support of and not allowed to stay stagnant and submerged, though granted the space for their eloquent despondencies. By the way, some may be pleased to hear this chap that wanders by the name of Adrian Portas vocally bears resemblance to Blackboard Jungle’s affectingly larynxed Kerry Price.
The
Monsters “I said ‘Baby do you like Rock’n’Roll?’ She said ‘Yes.’ I said “Baby you are full of shit! I HATE Rock’n’Roll. Rock’n’Roll’s for pussies…!!!”£%^&*()_!”£!!!’
It could be said the man is a visionary but far more than twaddle-some and trite this is a man who really would not take it anymore and instead of massacring a few McDonald’s workers he decided to bring nightmares and noxious delights to us with his nail-gun boogie and did everything his own fantabulous way, capturing the exhilarating primeval ridiculousness of barking out slabs of the most bonkers and unbridled music put to plastic and plastic-melting effect. Howling like Lemmy fulfilling those internet rumours with Sparky from Demented Are Go (who he shares a similar dispensation for depravity with) or something from Star Trek or Doctor Who and occasionally, as on the freakishly delinquent ‘Wild Thing’, even South Park’s Cartman, atop the unfathomable depths that only these fuckers could come up from - that of ‘clone-drums’ who sit facing each other - of course – Beat-Man savages your senses like a St Bernard that’s discovered the joys of the brandy box it carries. Some people would do this as an arty show of deconstructed values and a load of other shit, Beat-Man and his compadres in mayhem just slop out garage rock cured with carbon monoxide fumes dredged from the swampy viscera of a swirling surfers paradise invaded by a set of rather peckish sharks. This was mastered at Fistfucker studios by the way, and they have a song called ‘Fuck My Brain Buddh Buddah’ (billed as their ‘one and only religious song’!) for a short review, while they also do a version of ‘Lonesome Town’ that sounds like it holds the keys to the secrets and symbolisms of David Lynch’s recent films. There should be more bands like this. But I’m fucking glad there aren’t! Bin your disbelief, batten down the hatches, behold the fact it gets even crazier on disc two with tracks like ‘Zuri Bronnt’ and squat on your haunches (for you might just have an involuntary rectal relapse) and marvel at The Monsters. Rabid insanity could never be so righteous. Could it? Who was it that said expect the unexpected? Stu Gibson
Damned legend, Lords of the New Church damned legend and just damned legendary brilliance may be Mr Brian James’ hallmark but alas one that has taken him far from the ballpark of his erstwhile colleagues in their dreary goth dazes.
For a man whose first band was called Bastard we find no trace of growing old gracefully, reclining amongst reflective ballads and bollocksy colostomy bag whimperings about our benighted days. Instead Brian retired to his shed and turned up several withered Marshall’s, stuck a potato sack over the drums to stop his missus nagging and let rip with the customary caustic Telecaster antagonism, shakily balancing the Lords’ decadent elegance with his initial love of Stooge-d-up spiky scattergun clattering like on the ‘Neat Neat Neat’-referencing ‘Man With No Name’ Indeed, opener ‘Catch That Bird’ is a lovers leaving note as they head off following whatever the road may hold with ‘Shadow Lie Light’ it’s tender, almost T-REX-static counterpart. As the man himself says ‘it’s the only thing I wanted to do in my life and it still is’. Not quite glorious though it’s not short on ecstatic excerpts. Better though is that it IS far more than the out of time outpourings of an embarrassing has-been trading on past flatulent forays along the fault-lines of infamy.
Drop the needle in the groove and start to move!" – ‘Power of The 45’ Californian cool-cat Big Sandy and his flying right cohorts cut a well-combed dash through the well-thumbed travelogue from log-cabin days crowded round the radio in desolate dust-bowls, coming on like the house band for the graduation groundhog day.
“I thought sometimes oh I read too much…” – Nine While Nine “Men – bought and sold / And the world keeps turning People cold – And people burning…” – Amphetamine Logic
Age certainly hasn’t wearied them in their abhorrently attractive haughty appeal - the wit and wisdom still pierces like a depleted-uranium shell from an A-10 Warthog. Whether that be 1985’s debut ‘First And Last And Always’ with its opening shot declaiming impending dystopia from out of the shrouds of the bands personal dustopia i.e. ‘Black Planet’; Floodland’s (1987) down-pouring of dense symbolism and patent two-fingered salutes to all and sundry - hussies, harlots, Communists namesakes (departed guitarist Gary Marx) and a reflection of the decaying and fragmenting world adrift under Chernobyls’ clouds of radiation in a world still in the icy, and sweetly ironic Eldritchian grip of the Cold War and onto the impenetrable grandeur of 1990’s sleek oil-burning arena-ready ‘Vision Thing’ which applies as much to today’s political pantheon of peasants as Bill Hicks’ diatribes against Bush Snr. Almost simultaneously a compendium of spiritual, social and sexual stasis - cataloguing the subterfuge of sordid affairs (the brilliant mordant wit of A Rock And A Hard Place’s ‘She wanted a haven and a place to hide / So I gave her an alibi – took her inside’ or the ‘Sitting here now in this bar for hours / Strange men rent strange flowers’ motif to Floods 1 and 2), and Some Kind Of Stranger - a majestically sardonic ballad of medieval courtly chivalry as a thinly veiled tale of unceremonious backstage de-briefing after that days onstage sortie. A lyric to rival, if not surpass, Leonard Cohen, the Death Valley-dry humour can’t mask the splendour of whole phalanxes of the verses. But then that’s the idea…a seven minute chat-up line. Swaddled in irony as well as dry ice they may have been but ‘twas merely a metaphorical smokescreen for Mr Taylor’s playful ambiguity and the taste for disinformation of a Bowie-obsessive possessed with geeky arrogance. Consider the fragile anguish of Nine While Nine and its partner across great divides and desert plains Driven Like The Snow then the awesome Ribbons from Vision Thing (mirthfully called Visioin Thing on this review copy) – ‘Her lovers queued up in the hallway / I heard them scratching at the door / I tried to tell her about Marx and Engels, God and angels / I don’t really know what for – but she looked good in Ribbons’. Many other highpoints occur from these equally indispensable records. The double-headed colossi of Floodland’s Dominion / Mother Russia and This Corrosion, bombastic barricades and simply as magnificent as those at Memnon, Vision Things Bush Snr baiting title track , Detonation Boulevard and I Was Wrong. Scholar of all sorts of squalor, enigmatic chronicler, compiler of cryptic ciphers, eulogiser and interpreter of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ this is one triumvirate un-toppled. Undermined for years with the spurious Goth tag perhaps now’s the time for some serious reappraisal - to paraphrase Steve Earle’s Christmas In Washington… ‘Come back to us Eldritch come back to us now’. “The real truth is never spoken…” – Some Kind Of Stranger - All reviews by Stu Gibson ________________________________________________ |
Yeaaaah,
it’s time to pack the pout and party, people as SCOTS open up the trunk of
their clunking pick-up and pave you a new porch to pick on. While, as with
peers The Cramps and The B-52’s, this obstinate set of Hawaiian
shirt-sounding songsters may come across as being one of the ultimate set
of shakers of behinds both pert and pendulous this isn’t gonna stop their
version of ‘Funnel Of Love’ chilling you to the pleasure centres, which
sure beats the traditional weekend trip to the garden centre. While it’s
been covered in many guises - whether you think by chancers or
necromancers from Paul Fenech of psychobilly ‘legends’ The Meteors to
Social Distortion’s Mike Ness or Demented Are Go - it is perhaps, besides
Kate Pierson or Maria McKee, SCOTS chanteuse Mary Huff who is a perfect
candidate to slip succinctly into Wanda Jackson’s shoes. Similar words can
be used to fend off a grown man’s tears at her ride through Rose Garden
on a Bigsby surfboard helmed by master guitar grits-slinging front-man
Rick Miller. Don Gibson’s Oh Lonesome Me is hauled out of the
doldrums to wander resplendent in its desolation. T-Rex’s Life’s A Gas
is given the adult grace it deserves, if by that very measure it loses
some of it’s childlike essence to staid constraints, The Kinks’ Muswell
Hillbilly just had to be done really. I wonder if Ray Davies ever
imagined his little creation being chaperoned by these self-avowed
cheek-tonguing geeks. As is well known, a collection of covers is
tantamount to musical aridity yet SCOTS build a large pyre for such an
idea and use it as a campfire to prance around in an
A sweet-stridin’
slicked-back stream of gloriously bratty loose-limbed, slack-eyed delirium
from these testosteronic shock troopers that steams like a very busy
launderette caught up in a protection racket turf war that would’ve been
left on the cutting room floor of ‘True Romance’ for being to far-fetched
and fucked up to feature.
Honorary
Brit and multi-faceted and rightly famed uber-producer who flew in the
wake of, but not on the tails of, Phil Spector and Joe Meek
Visconti played as much of a decisive role in the launching of Bolan
as John Peel. The suitably florid relationship he ‘enjoyed’ with
the miniature minotaur is entertainingly documented, if you don’t laugh at
the preposterousness that Bolan left for posterity then you’ll just
be very irritated. The mostly warm friendship with David Bowie is
an obvious centrepiece of the book but shows the old dame in a glowing
light, the reference to Visconti’s meeting with Mick Jagger is in
total, though humorous again, contrast.
This
updated re-run of the original 1989 pressing includes five further
chapters in the ever more gruesome fairytale that is the life and times of
Phil Spector, to take in the slaying or, erm, suicide, of actress /
waitress Lana Clarkson at his castle home early in 2003. An
impossibly fascinating tale even without the eventual and all too
predictable final twist this is pretty much an essential read for anyone
who likes music, irrespective of whether that music is Spector’s or not,
purely for a study in the psychology and make-up of genius, and the
tragedy and self-indulgences that accompany it like fleeting romances.
Rightly revered for his innovative record production he is going end his
days being considered a case-study for crack-ups. Perhaps he simply peaked
prematurely but signs that his marbles had ended up in a field in
Minnesota or somewhere are evident in his ardour to produce Celine Dion. I
mean hopefully he just got muddled with her marvellous namesake that he’d
produced in the seventies. This, however, seems doubtful as by 2001 he’d
decided upon producing simpering indie whimps Starsailor, imagining them
as some second coming of Cohen. Indeed, how the mighty fall.
Grinderman
The
Monsters
This bunch
of crazy resistance fighters might have slight traces of a sly Stooges
drawl but they kick that crawl with the eerie, ethereal kingsnake
swagger of a ghost ridin’ guerrilla gang on sleighs surfing skies hauled
along by Satan’s skiers on cosmic snowflakes with unexpected stealth.
‘Dark Sunday Evening’ starts with a countryside lurch through Elvis’
‘Burning Love’ riff, all spliffed-up and supine from the munchies,
cascading through Sonic Boom’s tilt-a-whirl retina’s and
crash-landing into barren blue notes that descend into beatific
crescendos. Absolutely no blissed-out ‘Sunday Morning’s’ lounging
about in velvet underpants for these Swiss chemical over-lords, no sirree.
The literal tale of a hellhound on the trail to a lunch on his intestines
of ‘I Had A Dream’ out-weirds the similarly titled Nick Cave
mini-epic in far fewer, but rather more unsettling, words by recounting a
dream seemingly of anal rape by an incubus; ‘Don’t Leave Me’ is an
all at sea, all hands slipping off deck into quicksand pits of parched
bent strings and deftly addled blues drones. That they then lollop
a-loosely into a version of ‘Johnny Be Good’ (their spelling,
nit-pickers) that would frighten Hawkwind far more than Lemmy
ever did and have them hopping through henges is reason alone to sit up
and pay attention. There’s an equally startling version of Elmore
James’ ‘It Hurts Me Too, while ‘Winding Up’ is everything
Keef dreamed about doing ‘Beggars Banquet’, assuming Mr
Richards dreamt devoutly devious dreams of stomping Jagger’s
guts into glue which closer ‘When We Were Young’ manages to do.
Whilst the ace-men Spacemen 3’s pristine artefact that is ‘The
Perfect Prescription’ is an obvious template this Devils Motorcycle is
gunned with a fury the laconic Spacemen pair never could, and you hardly
miss the lack of loveliness that swirled the Spacemen’s orbits. Guitars
drone with the repetition of waves crashing into shorelines, eroding them
with lasso’s made of seaweed that whip like razor-wire. A beast to mirror
that records sparse beauty. Smashingly so. Stu Gibson
The man
that wrote the Damned’s first two albums and many a glorious moment
with the errant Stivney ain’t stumbing far from that state on this debut
by the delightfully monikered (also featuring Sham 69, Lords, er,
bass-plonker, Dave Tregunna) quartet. While it may not ascend such
crumbling heights of debauched deviancy it darn well drives nails into
your head and heart, never more so than on the two-note stinging, surging
whine of ‘Bad Boy’ and ‘Hey Little Girl’ meets ‘Everybody
Needs Somebody To Love’ of the playful ‘Green Worms’, that
captures the rampant spirit of the Stiv, where ‘Nurse’
marries the Rock’n’Roll nurse of ‘Pills’ to ‘Making Time’
with not-quite-conjugal rites of convalescence, one suspects, in the
kidney ward.
But this
sure ain’t no dusty trawl through a nostalgia-land of singing, swinging
cowboys and pig-tailed, plaid shirted cowgirls giving salutary genre
genuflections and paltry posturings, paying lip service to some pathetic
‘billy trend. Big Sandy sounds quintessentially authentic yet in no way
outdated, showing both their subtle, no need to shout it from the rooftops
writing talents, and the eternal yearning a certain section of society
will always crave and crawl after. That they also inflect their country
swing with elements from the other side of town does them no harm either -
see the Motown stomp of ‘Slippin’ Away’, the E-Street
bar-band coda to ‘Haunted Heels’ or the Mariachi tree-felling
tremulous twangs on the besotted ode to a devilish dame that be ‘Ruby
Jane’, the closing time tinges of regret on ‘Spanish Dagger’ (‘As I
gracefully recover from a stagger…’). What wins through endlessly though
is the lovely mellifluity of Big Sandy’s Buddy Holly croon,
narrating his lovelorn tales in a deftly almost diffident manner, that can
turn even the rockiest songs here just about a tearjerker, as on ‘Love
That Man’. Couple that with his sad-eyed slant at social observation (‘The
Great State Of Misery’) and a general level of turning something old
into something new (‘Lonesome Dollar’ could have been scrawled on a
beer mat or napkin any time in the last eighty or so years but has had to
wait patiently to be picked up), then you can picture in one paint-stroke
why this set of classy chooglers stand far apart from all the ten-a-penny
cliché-a-billy berks out there preening in front of each others dice ‘n’
cherry tattoos. All this long while pristinely delicate swing rhythms
trundle gently by, pedal steel with the power to transport you, magic
carpet style to plateaus and vistas beyond the brim and the jazzy
Scotty Moore meets Merle Travis and at times even Bill
Monroe’s clawhammer bluegrass mandolin style, similar to Danny B.
Harvey, most demonstrable on the western swinging bop of ‘Yes (I
Feel Sorry For You)’ take you by the hand and coax even the most
dance-shy and the toe-tappingly timid onto the dance-floor. Greatness is
deserving of gratitude, sinners, sleazers ‘n’ strollers. 
Cunt,
cleric and all-round acerbic commentator of our descent into cataclysm
Andrew Eldritch’s masterpieces of didactic disdain are here reissued,
if not resurrected, and refurbished with single b-sides (a typically
disappointing disregard for issuing a swathe of out-takes). Still all set
to conquer our deconstructed post-modern conundrum these appear almost as
missives, reminders from a bygone age. A highly cerebral ‘I told you so’
of sorts from a tarnished throne set in front of Elvis-like banks of TV
screens but ever watching the news channels and laughing at his own grim
genius.