oh the joy the bruised joy, the grinning gleeful perversity of a band who’ll do a one song twenty three minute encore introduced as ‘probably the least liked track of our career’. yup, the uber-dirge, the monolithic lament, the fucked blues doom klang of 13 blues for thirteen moons. probably the angriest song lyrically maybe anyway they’ve written: in gated chambers they did meet with cardboards stocking upon their feet and tattled long their tattered road and none did ease no others load the leaden lips of spittled gloom where leaders lunch on meat and ruin and depth and light have long been truant while our nation’s shores go on bleeding into the ocean… let it fall down and let it be soon…
and preceding this orgasmic climax, well the big raw angry tender racket was sure on display, the ferocious bloody passion, the hoom of eerie minimalist funeral laments and choral chants, ripping hellfuck into strings and skins and keys, violins hacking through clatter, it’s all wars of every kind, it’s all music and unposturing and honesty, give me a goddam shovel i’ll dig my own hole, thumping cacaphony, dynamic and stuttering, vicious, sinew and tendon and straining muscle, punks got the loveliest dreams, let tonight be the night when it ends, tell me there is a me, there is a light, there, is, a, light, i will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at, open up, holler fuckit, here i am, here’s what i am, jackdaws be damned, but trying, always trying, fury, the senselessness of things tempered by the unexpectation of beauty, a flower growing in a bombed city, the flicker of light at the end of the goddamned tunnel, a sliver of optimism poking through the murk, olaf(being to all intents a corpse and wanting any rag upon what god unto him gave) responds,without getting annoyed “i will not kiss your fucking flag”, olaf(upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat “there is some shit i will not eat”, tearing as they do through laments and elegies, fukd chamber slashing, guitar raw red raw, percussion like so many bombs, blooze and folk flicker and crackle, and that voice, a marvel of effort over aptitude, broken not broken from the struggle to be heard above fireworks, an instrument, like lydon, like simone, like boon, pleads warns encourages demands dance motherfuckers and we do, we do, atop some skewed brash brazen graceful lumpen thing that stutters and crashes around us in some petitioning waltz, oh it’s the sadness of the brass band punk hymnal, elegies to the dead and dying, that coil uncoil meander mournful near coherency, it’s that heart bared and honest, euphoric and joyous, that heart exposed to bloodied beaks, bruised and dirty but still deceptively strong, oh how my baby flew with heart so high and aim so true, and some hearts are true, but some hearts aren’t hardly true, but some hearts are true…
and jeez, forgot how good that bad brains record is.
and before these fuckers stole it, my heart, oh my heart, before that:
a feast of fingers tapping and scrapping and picking through steel (or nylon?) strings, an alliterative dainty digital dance. this exquisite bastardised unflamenco, this alone on stage fella with skinful of tattoos and nervous grace, getting all rhythm and melody on us, getting all loose stringed and virtuous. dextrous, nimble, flickering strobe like along frets, flitting giddy across strings in tortuously contorted finger strewn legerdemain. y’know in the mould of that effortlessly fluid string mangling represented by a punk rock basho-junghans, an inked rick bishop, a six stringed jim blackshaw (none of whom i can recall ever playing fingerdrums on cedar body). that kind of modern day experimental brain / hand free dissociation. yup. and an ‘i’ve been listening to yr conversation all night and that’s the funniest thing you’ve said’ pithy putdown to you chattering fools. learn some fucking manners eh.
