Suicide Squeeze Records (label)
08 September 2017 (released)
08 September 2017
Similar in feel, tone and attitude to other West Coast narco-rock this year (The Black Angels, The Molochs), this hell-A trio’s eponymous LP delivers 9 seedy tales from the City of (fallen) Angels.
Coming over like The Shangri-Las fronting The Ventures if they’d woken from a night on the up and downs and decided to jam, these are vivid missives from the underbelly, the hazy dusk vistas that permeate the sun-drenched gates to Hades. The angelic ascent before the devilish descent.
In kinship with other cellar-dwellers (Brian Jonestown Massacre), grave throbbers (The Cramps) and celestial travellers (Mazzy Star) familiar signifiers abound (cars, jeans, killing your baby …), all adding up to a technicolour-spectacular Russ Meyer sexploitation flick (of the knife): the dream piercing harder than reality ever could.
The nihilistically gauzy ‘You love nothing’ is a brush-off to a loser, a chooser, a floozer that blew it. His options have run out, time elapsed.
Stand-out ‘Drive your car’ is the Throwing Muses having undergone an esoteric ritual, Sade Sanchez’s malevolent muffled mutterings in tandem with the pounding beat-pair of Irita Pai (ace bass) and Ellie English (skins). A one-way journey into madness before an (existential) breakdown at the side of the road to hell.
‘Baby in blue jeans’ has Sanchez’s vocals sounding like Stevie Nicks during the Rumours sessions, druggish and sluggish (allegedly), drawled up and wrenched out verbiage all expertly backed by jingle-jangle Marychainsaw guitars.
This is an album that’s a primal scream from herstory, an aural era-echo, a reminder of the potency of simplicity. In these time of hyper-polished surface-level robo-pap this reverb-al psyche-bashing of magick abstracktion and spell-blinding garage-rock is a salve.
THIS is the season of the witch.
