Music’s strangest séance gets its final incantation – tea brewed, minds blown.
Three albums into their collaborative endeavours, we can safely remove any semblance of novelty from this album. Now able to record together in Peter Buck‘s basement, with Scott McCaughey, one of music’s safest pair of hands on bass, and Linda Pitmon on drums, there’s frenzied chemistry, reflected in the super-swift five-day recording of the 13 new tracks.
There is little really that reflects on Buck and Luke Haines‘ most famous ex-combos, with only ‘Children of the Air’ having a claustrophobic noirish echo of The Auteurs‘ ‘After Murder Park’ about it. Instead, there’s some urgent fretboard jabbing (actually harking back more clearly to McCaughey’s Young Fresh Fellows), and some reverential (and equally some disparaging) glances at everyone from The Stooges, Roxy Music, Morrissey, T-Rex and…well, you get the idea.
Billed as the conclusion of the ‘psychiatry trilogy’, Haines, as always, crafts his lyrics such that they are both barbed and pointed and so deeply encoded that he could easily be singing about you and you’d never catch on. There’s still both disdain and hero worship of the medium, both Buck and Haines doubledown on their well-worn furrow, and one might well think that the last thing the latter needs is someone egging him on, but whilst some recent releases have been a little stodgy and more deliberately arch and obtuse, there really is plenty to enjoy without feeling you need to reach out for your alt Rosetta Stone.
Of particular note are ’56 Nervous Breakdowns’, which features some lovely punchy drums and, appropriately, just about 3 times the vinegar grenades the Rolling Stones mustered with their mere 19. ‘Sufi Devotional’ warns of ‘hocus pocus’ and ‘weapons of mass psychic attack’ whilst Buck’s guitar slides down your throat and squeezes your lungs, and some lovely mellotron coaxing you to the brink of madness. ‘Radical Bookshop Now’ (“I want to die in a radical bookshop”, “Get lucky in a radical bookshop”) has Beatles-y immediacy and cockroach intent, though the last track, ‘Special Guest Appearance’, is the real star, prompting an immediate replaying of the whole album, simply to savour how gloriously it caps things off. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Beck and Warren Ellis are summoned to the table and compared to how others have to make do with a guest appearance from cancer of Old Nick. Deliciously, Mott the Hoople’s Morgan Fisher makes a special guest appearance on piano.
There’s a booklet, but don’t expect lyrics – instead, there are different coloured Bedford vans, each with their own code. Time to get cracking? No, it’s not a record for decoding, it’s a séance to be savoured over time, just let the chaos and magik reign whilst the kettle boils.
Daz Lawrence