I’m not sure whether I’ll be covering as much garage rock this year as I did last year. I find that a little of it goes a long way without generating much to write about, unless you start reviewing the audience or pulling in some other contextual hobby-horses. That said, I do like what Baba Yaga’s Hut do, and part of what they do includes this noisy sweatbox of a show coming up at the weekend:
Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs + Luminous Bodies + Casual Sect + Girl Sweat The Victoria, 451 Queensbridge Road, Hackney, London, E8 3AS, England
Saturday February 6th 2016, 8.00pm – more information
Heavy-motorik Tynesiders Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are pretty brutal. That psychotic iteration-stutter of a name gives it all away before you even get to the music. I dropped a few chromosomes just by listening to them. Imagine the tangled ball-web of a lurking cellar spider: imagine Hawkwind being carjacked halfway down Ladbroke Grove, the steering wheel dragged out of Dave Brock’s hands. Expect a dystopian thrum of attenuated gutter grooves, early Ubu synth sousings and righteously pissed-off howls from singer Matt Baty, plus tossing, turning rhythm and cymbal work from the band’s drummer Ewan MacKenzie, who adds a powerful synaptic crackle to the whole business. Here’s twelve-and-a-half minutes of them…
https://vimeo.com/122271442
Regarding the support bands… Luminous Bodies lurched up from the underground back in December, when they were seen supporting Rocket from the Tombs in London. For those of you who don’t remember that particular occasion, they’re a noise-rock supergroup, a gang of self-proclaimed knuckle-draggers pounded together like clumps of dirty wet clay, sharing players with bands including Ikara Colt, Part Chimp and Terminal Cheesecake. Casual Sect began knocking out their ratchety noisepunk (part conspiracy paranoia, part wink-to-camera) across a set of demos and gigs last year. Girl Sweat is less familiar to me: a one-man show of soiled electro-pop exotica and psychedelic fringe from Stockton-on-Tees, where the smog chews at the fake leather in the pub furnishings.
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More gig news shortly – Teeth Of The Sea, an evening of Bad Elephant Music, and much more (including plenty of folk-baroque guitar).
The Scaramanga Six: ‘The Continuing Saga of The Scaramanga Six’
“Horsepower – horseplay!” As The Scaramanga Six plunge down into Pressure Cage with a ferocious blurt of punched-out amplifiers, they show they’ve evolved into a much more direct band than the psychedelic gangland chroniclers they’ve been before. Now less haunted by intimations – and more stirred by actual events – their Birthday Party/Six By Seven dirty-rock assault is more bloodshot eyes than shifty gazes.
Pressure Cage, in particular, is a blazing reaction to all manner of stress – fantastically blunt and brutal. In a mottled fury, Paul Morricone seethes against ram-raiders, bad business deals and the nine-to-five in full walking-heart-attack mode, as the guitars vent gallons of spleen in a whirl of booze-induced bludgeoning. “I love being a suit-and-tie, / my face is red and I’m gonna die. / Don’t force me or you’ll tip the scales – / I’m just a workhorse in your pressure cage.”
The frightening violence of small men oozes across this EP: Scaramanga territory, for sure. While Pressure Cage’s narrator restricts his own petty tyrannies to domestic violence and to intimidating waitresses, the protagonist of Big in a Small Town haunts the scenes of past humilations and (to a backing clang of pulsating guitars and death-metal screeches) ferments savage bile as fuel. “This was a schoolyard: / the boys, they used to play hard. / I swore revenge at the things they would do – / I’d make them eat the shit from my shoes!”. He may or may not be the hard-nut and big-shot he claims to be (“round these parts, know my voice – / know my roles, know my Royce!”) but he’s obviously bonded himself to his hometown with vicious sentiment – “ring me up and I’ll show you round…/ This is the place I was born – / I swore I would take it, I swore I’d do more,” – and with a kind of predatory benevolence (“they are good people, / I know they’re grateful.”)
But Scaramanga songs are ultimately less about power than they are about damage. Steve Morricone delivers The Stupidest Man in the World in hollow, flinty, brittle tones (like Nick Cave with a punctured lung) while drums, guitars and whining Moog fold up melodramatically around him like a collapsing shack. “His path is paved with such bitter regrets / as he ponders on the sweet lips, all the work he did neglect… / You kids, with your hearts so young and so free, / take some advice from this broken man you see.”
The stunning Singer of Songs staggers from the horror of burnout and loss, and of seeing your own swollen hands break what’s precious. “I don’t know my strength – did I brush you away / when all I wanted to was keep you in place?” laments Paul over seasick organ. Still there’s that helpless clutching after vindication, after control (“I’m the singer, the singer of songs / I can’t help but speak the truth and do no wrong,”) even though the song ends in a roar of sirens, churning guitars and a confessional howl of “I can’t help myself… I mean it…”
And as for the hope of breaking old habits… well, resignation drenches the final song alongside the weary old cinema organ. “Is there a chapter where the man loses heart?” Paul ponders aloud. “Is this the beginning of a new avenue? / Will your replacement just repeat after you?” Having broken the scabs on the psychic wounds of the dark Yorkshire streets their songs inhabit, The Scaramanga Six don’t bring any balm. What they do bring, though, is a devastating observation of the cycles of violence and desperation that breed there. This band gets ever more powerful, ever more essential.
The Scaramanga Six: ‘The Continuing Saga of The Scaramanga Six’ Wrath Records, WRATHCD02 (Barcode)
CD-only EP
Released: January 2002 Get it from:(2020 update) buy CD from The Scaramanga Six Shop; download from Google Play; stream via Deezer, Apple Music or Spotify The Scaramanga Six online:
Sidle into the world of The Scaramanga Six carefully. When it’s not simmering in darkness or in the threat of chucking-out time aggro, it’s shrouded in threatening, paranoid twilight or caught in the jaws of mean streets. There’s a jagged, brutally slashing organ; guitars that bludgeon and swipe; heavy beat-downs of choruses; and voices that crack and fray nastily with the surge of the music. This is hard-centred pop music, made by five tough-looking guys in suit-and-ties and a woman who looks like the gang boss’ daughter, taking her own team out to batter the husbands of her schoolday rivals.
Or maybe it’s in the mind. Though the Scaramangas seem steeped in a very English, Godfathers-style violence of petty brawls, drink-fuelled action (“give me some courage, and make it Dutch”) and frustration penned-up in hometown limits, they aren’t numbed by it. Instead, they use it as the spur for a fierce, dramatic rock with the fierce intensity of Pixies, Cardiacs or – most precisely – Six By Seven. There’s an explosive force to Paul and Steve Morricone’s band that equals that of Nottingham’s hard poets of anti-glamour. And if they’re not as sophisticated as Pulp (another ready comparison) they’ve got bigger claws.
The jerking brutality of Are You One of the Family, in which Paul’s grim vocal balances on shards of gasping organ, sets up this EP’s general atmosphere of dirty surrealism. It’s a nightmare of social claustrophobia in which “everything is family – / the cars that pass, the crazy gas that’s surrounding me” and where “everything you see and do / comes back to someone who you are related to.” A place in which there’s no escape from surveillance: “a man will stop and ask my name / I needn’t answer – our names are the same. / I have cousins in the trees; / and, in the bushes, uncles watching over me.”
Ladies and Gentlemen is also family business – ostensibly, it’s a sentimental song, but Paul sings it with a battleship-grey clang which suggests that someone at the party will be going home in a box. “We are gathered here today, in a room sitting comfortably. / Let me shake your hands. / You want to be entertained, you want to be out for fun / and there is someone amongst us here / who I can never forget.” Beyond the funereal organ and the leaden-weight crash of guitars, nothing actually happens… but the Yorkshire Mafiosi atmosphere soaks the air.
Relief from this tension is briefly found in the pop-eyed psychobilly of Grasp the Candle, in which Steve Morricone is let off the leash to trade screams with guitarist Julia Arnez, going for the debaser vote in a shambles of scuzzy drums, Birthday Party crashes and throbbing veins. “I’ve been sharing my bed with the drones from the hive, / I think I’d rather be buried alive… I hear you moaning and groaning – / my love is ripe for the dethroning.”
For Disenchanted Melody, the tension is back – although this time it’s in the even-more implicit shape of a hushed, mantric Slint-meets-Velvets thrum; a hauntingly sour psychedelic vocal drone, filled with foreboding. A guitar sets up a ceaseless metallic shiver behind the murmuring, harshly lovely harmonies and the gathering darkness of the words. “Night collapses suddenly… disenchanted melody / gently washes over me – / the sound is there, / the sound of air…” Even before the final burst of clanging guitar racket and hellish chorale, the air’s been sucked away around the song, whipped off down the streets where the family prowls.
This is a dark and powerful band, who hang around like a threatening cloud even after the music stops.
The Scaramanga Six: ‘Are You One of the Family?’ Wrath Records, WRATHCD01 (barcode unavailable)
CD-only EP
Released: April 2001 Get it from:(2020 update) buy CD from The Scaramanga Six Shop; download from Google Play; stream via Deezer, Apple Music or Spotify The Scaramanga Six online:
Mark Eitzel: ‘Caught in a Trap and I Can’t Back Out ‘Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby’
It’s almost unbelievable to think that Mark Eitzel has left San Francisco. American Music Club’s former frontman seemed umbilically tied to the city where manifest destiny unravels on the edge of the continent, whose battered and crumbling communities of survivors – whores, AIDS victims, blown-out drifters slipping off the Dream – inhabited his heartwracking music, and fleshed out the nagging sense of dislocation and struggle that’s marked his life both in and out of song. But leave it he has, settling in the sharper climes of New York City.
Exchanging the Bay for Times Square seems to have lent his work an East Coast leanness. Now Eitzel’s songs exist in a flat, pressed-out space, far removed from AMC’s rich troubled orchestrations, or even from the jazz’n’torch-toned crooner feel of his ’60 Watt Silver Lining’ solo debut. Sometimes more acid is etched into a song via a bleak, distant bilous buzz or splurge of electric guitar (from former Cramp/Bad Seed Kid Congo Powers – the hollow roar of an empty belly at 4 a.m. A couple of songs are hammered home with bass and drums, courtesy of various Yo La Tengo-ists and Sonic Youth-ers. But most often it’s the man himself alone. Tumbles of bleak, dirty imagery which Eitzel’s cracked, scuffed baritone (sometimes horrified, most often seamed with the scars of painful living) releases over the tangled patterns of the acoustic guitar he fingers as if it were a crown of thorns.
Previously, in the transcendent sadness of AMC songs like Blue & Grey Shirt or Will You Find Me?, this recipe included beautiful compassionate tunes which yearned and reached towards something beyond the earthbound and betrayed. ‘Caught in a Trap…’ (which actually predates ‘West’, Eitzel’s gentler but underwhelming ’97 collaboration with Peter Buck) makes few attempts to sweeten the bitter brilliant pills of Eitzel’s words. Its songs, voiced in a spare fatal music pitched between Robert Johnson and Nick Drake, increasingly illustrate a life close to an exhausted edge.
If it isn’t quite Eitzel’s ‘Pink Moon’, it comes near enough in its cryptic fatalism – though his image of a barfly Santa Claus pursued by wolves on Xmas Lights Spin suggest it might be his Hellhound On My Trail. Eitzel’s surreal yet bitingly direct lyrics spin past in a tattered blur of clown suits, heavy air, butcher’s shops, paralysed snowmen and the inevitable cheerless bars – sort of like Jean-Paul Sartre as a battered folk singer, trapped in a junkshop haunted with the tracings of hopes and dreams.
Importantly, though, it’s not a question of self-pity. Are You the Trash addresses a hapless somebody lifted and dumped by a seductive other (“Evil wears a big smile, evil loves your mind, evil gets what it wants, evil leaves you behind…”). Yet it acknowledges our own capacity to play out our victimhood – “Even when he hurts you, well, it all seems okay. / His beauty is always beyond you / and somehow always gets in the way.” Years ago, Eitzel reminded us that “bad habits make our decisions for us.” ‘Caught In A Trap…’ deals with what happens when those habits become a way of life, as they have for the lost souls he’s sketching when he sings “most people want to inhabit their lives like ghosts and drift from room to room, / and brag about what imprisons them, and wait for the sweep of a broom.”
This time around, it’s more of a warning. On Auctioneer’s Song your heart can pull skywards like a balloon, but at the price of being as loseable, likely to find all of that lift someone else’s careless hot air, while callous smiling figures prance in to move the world on around you. Whoever’s narrating the drained Bob Mould-ish Cold Light of Day, wrapped up in ice-storm guitar, is frighteningly isolated – lurking in “the darkest part of the trees” or “five fathoms down”, determined not to hurt anybody but in constant fear of discovery. Queen of No One seems to be a portrait of a gay bar filled with scared men unable to find courage even on their own turf, as if frostbite had suddenly scarred and paralysed them at the humid peak of their Mardi Gras.
While in the past Eitzel might have railed against these little stagnations, now he’s considering them with a new eye. As prompted on the otherwise exhausted Goodbye: “Seeing eye dog on the end of its leash says ‘how can you live without trust?'” Often the best decision seems to be to close things down with as much grace and acceptance as you can. One song, with a hushed dark finger-picked melody mixing seduction with warning, sees Eitzel left behind, watching his companion travel solo on a collapsing funfair ride and concluding “If I had a gun, I would seal my fate with you… / I would give you your freedom.” Maybe it’s suicide or murder he has in mind, maybe a death pact or an escape, but you know that given the power he’s going to make some decisive gesture, simple and final.
And the need for this becomes heartbreaking in Go Away (the latest in Eitzel’s vein of harrowing songs about his doomed muse Kathleen Burns), during which Eitzel seems to be pushing with both palms and a stricken gaze, trying to tap the strength of his towering love into one last desperate attempt towards freeing his lover into an uncertain redemption: “I know you’ve got a plank to walk, I know you’ve got a kite to fly.” The knowledge that you’re going to have to strip yourself away from someone for whom you can do no more – or whom you simply hinder – is far harder than a simple thwarted love. That’s the place where everything slips out of both your grasp and your tread – as Eitzel sings “my touch just makes you draw / farther and farther / and farther away.” And it’s no wonder that the way he’s howling the title in the chorus finds him stuck on the hard place between searingly selfless compassion and blind, wounded resentment.
At least he’s seen a few ways out of the trap. On Atico 18 things have got to the point where cynicism manifests as an aimless couch-potato snake haunting the living room, but even as it grumbles in the corner, it’s lost its power. Eitzel’s already ignoring it: “the only love you’ll ever know is to look beyond the things you know.”
By Sun Smog Seahorse (which also made a showing on last year’s rare-as-hen’s-teeth, fans-only album ‘Lover’s Leap USA‘) he seems to have reached a point of peace. Squinting up throught the fog into a sky that finally seems benign in its indifference; screwed-up eyes and relinquishment, a rope that “ties it up, delivers it home.” It feels like a suicide abandoned – one which has been lost to a day’s acceptance. Redemption in the ability to let go, to blank out of it for long enough.
Mark Eitzel: ‘Caught in a Trap and I Can’t Back Out ‘Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby’
Matador Records Ltd., OLE 179-2 (7 44861 01792 9)
CD/LP album
Released: 20th January 1998 Get it from: on general release. Mark Eitzel online:
Various riot-on grrls and drama queens, once they’ve tired of punking up girl-group lisping, like to play with those oh so challenging images of junkies and whores. Well, good luck, kids. Play nicely. But while you try on the roles like they’re attention grabbing prom dresses, Carla Bozulich has genuinely Been There, Done That during her own harrowing past. And she’s brought back a mass of bone-breaking songs with her on her voyage back from the brink. And her band, The Geraldine Fibbers, bring them to life the way a flamethrower brightens up, oh, any social gathering where plenty of flammable frills are clustered together. Wake up time, you pretty things.
Oh yes. See them run for cover.
Whoever’s heard the previous Fibbers album, ‘Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home’, will have an idea of what to expect. Except that ‘Butch’ is to its predecessor what ‘Nevermind’ is to ‘Slippery When Wet’. Maybe it’s the recruitment of new guitarist Nels Cline, or maybe it’s just Carla finally diving full into the fray with both feet; but ‘Butch’ is a uninhibited maelstrom of ferocious guitars that lash like electrified hair, bass that booms like an iceberg smacking up the side of the Titanic, spasms of frenetic voodoo drumming and Jessy Greene’s violin flaying the skin off any ear that’s left unflattened.
Oh, and Carla’s voice. Emmylou Harris channeling Diamanda Galas doesn’t come halfway to this. As sharp and as powerful as a swung shoulderblade, as pointed as a knitting needle driven through the brain. The raw power of someone who’s lived through enough not to give a flying fuck about what anybody else thinks.
Of course in Fibberworld the fucks are probably flying. Like fists. Airborne, fast, rolling over; brutal, biting, clawing like rabid eagles. Sex permeates this album like river water in Ophelia’s bridegown, and while there’s a wild exhilaration to it, it’s never far from violence, meted out by Carla herself or by one of the other stark shadowy characters who ripple through her songs like sharks in a blood trail. There’s been nothing like this since that crack of psychic thunder that was the first Throwing Muses album twelve years ago. And if you’ve always missed that original, wantonly possessed Kristin Hersh since she mellowed into first a college rock icon and then an eldritch acoustic housewife, Carla beckons with a sharply bevelled fingernail and a mouthful of mercilessly shredded woman-words.
You think “Muses”, you think “X”; you think “Hole with talent instead of just posturing”; you think “early Velvets on nightmare acid, and with Nico convulsing out of that Teutonic cool for once.” And you also think country music, which soaks the fabric of “Butch” and ferments their Los Angeles punk hearts. But this is no joker’s cowpunk. It’s got black humour in spades, but the Fibbers’ brand of fucked-up country keeps the ravaged heartland heartstrings and sour juice intact.
Folks Like Me’s wooden, honky-tonk four-four has the inevitable slippery lap steel and plaintive weave of fiddle, the queasy bends of guitar and voice. But this is a tale of life off the highways, in the darkest and most twisted woods: Tammy Wynette via ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Angel Heart’. This time, the woman who can’t stand by her man comes of strange and sinister stock (“My heart wants to remain what I’ve become… / There’s no word for this where I come from”) and she knows that the idyll must end before her own blood catches up with her: “Your Lord knows I don’t want to leave here. / I’d like to stay in this little house and provide for you / and if I knew I’d only be risking my own life, / I’d stay until they came and struck me dead, / but I couldn’t stand to see them hurt a hair on your sweet head…”
Pet Angel gives us an American Gothic waltz with lyrics infested by wild wood romance and ‘Twins Peaks’ owls: “You cradle my body in sweetness and warmth, and a sweet wind blows through the trees… / The rain cracks the sky like tears of joy… makes mischief in her hair.” Love and death are inextricably combined (“You are my sunshine, I pull the drapes shut tight. / It’s curtains for you, goodbye. / The cat’s in the bag, the bag’s in the river, / the river makes me cry”), and out here, murder’s as natural as prayer: “To you, to you, straight up to you, / into your charitable hands/ Take care of him, Jesus, I know you’ll do what’s best / Lay his wicked soul to rest.”
Carla’s worldview is nightmarish, constantly under attack, with even the sun joining in with the warfare – on California Tuffy, she announces “a ball of light comes down / to bite me on the ass, the legs, the breasts / I’m falling from my nest.” And the answer is a swipe back with all the claws out, claiming “Yes I am just a tart, a heart on stilts. / Pick the flower and it will wilt, / to die in bliss, for a greedy lover’s kiss” before stinging back with a flail of electric noise and “you will never get my heart.” Toy Box is brutally, near unbearably graphic, a hall of distorting mirrors and wartime dispatches from the sex trade – “My shell on top of your knotty fist / with a speculum shoved up my cunt after hours… / For one lousy minute she felt like a queen. / I stand her naked at attention. Is this my only skill?”
Then there’s the metal hammering of I Killed the Cuckoo, as guitars screech, text goes through the mincer, fate and conflict body-slam in illegible shards. “The clock is dead for once and for all / until the next time I run in with you… / Lay me lower than I prayed for sweety heart… / In the end you crash into a milk truck. / I can see it in the tea leaves: you’re fucked.” In Arrow to My Drunken Eye there’s a flicker of incestuous horror in the warning “don’t be caught with your nightie mussed / and if you are questioned don’t tell them what we’ve discussed.”
Maybe it’s for respite from the rage, but scattered through ‘Butch’ are doorways to elsewhere as the band sink the odd claw into the avant-garde. There’s the drowned fairground ghosting of Heliotrope; or the venomous ambient murk enveloping Claudine’s New Orleans lurch, full of knuckly hideous life, like facehuggers trying to clamber out of a gumbo. And there’s a blood pulsing, amyl nitrate cover of Can’s You Doo Right – enough to scare the gloves off Holger Czukay and have aseptic contemporary Krautrock boys bricking it en masse.
However, it’s always Carla’s songs that snatch the attention; and rightly so. Here’s a reckless and merciless imagination at work, exploring the fragility of an ageing drag queen on the title track (“pushin’ thirty five under an answer blanket”) who’s “always a much prettier bird than any old girl bird… / Shades of light green, deep blue and just a touch of rouge / It’s funny how easy it is to lose / And all you’re left with is chaos and a dirty face.” Or diving into chaos with Seven or In 10 as she explodes around the body of a enemy lover, abandoning control and bringing down a foe with her: “I’ve gotta little trick for you. / I can split in two / or in seven / or in ten / little friends on whom I can depend… / We told you not to get inside our head or in our bed. / You wanna own this dish so you can eat it any time you wish… / Not so fast, fucker!”
But even as Carla delivers a full on primal punk scream of “you might think I hate you!”, she offers us no straight answers. Well, there aren’t any. Part of the impact of ‘Butch’ is that whatever Carla’s had to go through, she’s now so well adapted to it that you can’t imagine her living away from it. The world’s often built on chaos and violence; Carla’s found out more about that than most; and she’s now too much a part of it to ever escape. But if she’s ambiguously intertwined with the hand that beats, she’s also biting it ’til it bleeds.
Roll up the sunroof, mount rocket launchers on the beach buggy and hit Venice Beach with your anger clenched in your fist. Run down any fucker that gets in your way. It’s a sun ripped jungle out there, full of dangerous fruit. California dreaming will never be the same again.
The Geraldine Fibbers: ‘Butch’
Virgin Records America Inc., CDVUS 133 / 7243 8 44629 2 5 (724384462925)
CD-only album
Released: 1st July 1997 Get it from:(2020 update) Best obtained second-hand or streamed. The Geraldine Fibbers online: Additional notes:(2020 update) The Geraldine Fibbers split up after ‘Butch’. Carla Bozulich and Nels Cline went on to form Scarnella; more famously, Nels eventually joined Wilco. Carla now has a solo career as well as working with her band Evangelista.
Heard it all before, but I can always hear it again.
Matt Keating is one of those characters who’s always to be found blowing in off the road and settling himself on the stage. The sort of guy who could quite easily survive in a world made up merely of roads, acoustic guitars, small vans, and at every stop a bar with a stage. His music’s of that well-worn style that’s like those magical rock star jeans Springsteen’s patented that never wear out, just go on weathering forever.
You’ve heard what it’s like many times before, in a world where guitars are sharp, to the point, and preferably recorded in one take in a converted potato shed (or a basement eight track in Matt’s case) and where Neil Young, Tom Petty et al still have the last word in what something should sound like. But with ‘Killjoy’, where it’s at is in what he’s saying, not how he sounds.
‘Killjoy’ is a bleak, wistful record. Memories of apartments and arguments, knowing that you’re too smart to deserve the fate you’re doling out to yourself, but too much pulled down by slack to get out of it. The travelogue of a not-so-beautiful loser, punctuated by cracks of sharp, self-aware laughter: “you wanted a man of substance, you got one with substance abuse”, or “once in a while I lose control, and gain my soul.” Matt’s world is one where it’s a constant struggle to crawl out from under the rocks: shame, despondency, the baggage of the past. In the dozen songs on this record, he drags himself about halfway out. The beaky stare he’s giving me off the back of the album seems to say “well, I try, but it’s life that slumps.”
That said, it’s not one of those whinging therapy records, even if The L Word’s chunky garage guitar and swamp-bird slide hints otherwise. In a post-breakdown breakdown of all the denials in a life, Matt explores the words for the ideas which people forbid themselves to say out of fear, and thereby condemn themselves to ignorance and incapability. Suicide, the mysteries of sex, the terrors of commitment – all end up edged around in language reducing them from human situations to “specimens / floating in formaldehyde.”
Far better to try to get your message across, though more people seem to be spending their time escaping from the obligation to do this. You and Me and This TV has Matt and his girlfriend cheek-to-cheek in a small room, numbed out of conversation by the telly (“stranded on a cathode sea, surfing channels for days, / fixing our gaze – not on each other”), as he pleads “just hit the remote and read what I wrote / before the rays erase me.” Not that getting through is easy with the other things crawling out from under those rocks, too. Like the sour small town working man in While We Fiddle whose discontent leads him into the arms of right wing revolt: or the girl in Just to Feel Something who starts off cutting herself and ends up cutting off her own hope.
The perversity of human nature is on display everywhere. In the Leonard Cohen-ish drawl of The Fruit You Can’t Eat, Matt sourly comments “young people wish they were old, the old folks all wish they were young, / and some people wish they were dead, but most would just settle to see someone hung / for a crime they dream of committing, but commitment’s what they’re afraid of. / In this case the punishment’s fitting to wring your own hands ’til your fingers are numb.” Against this wounded cynicism you can set his compassion, continually coming through like cracks in a stone face – “I wouldn’t trade a day for the moments I’ve wasted / listening to your heart pound like a sad drummer’s beat.”
Like Mark Eitzel or Morrissey, he continually stares into the abyss yawning behind humanity’s tiny fractures, unable to ignore it. Transcendent despair and anger isn’t his way, though: more a sturdy refusal to give in. On By the Way, Matt might complain that “the pieces fit, but I’m still puzzled”, but he knows that to be alive means having to constantly deal with the swinging inconsistent gaps between aspiration, failure and effort: to recognise sometimes that “what you’ve mistaken for peaceful / is only the sound of good and evil’s uneasy truce.” And that being alive and caring about all this means that you’re stuck with the bittersweet burden.
On Happy Again, rolling around the outskirts of the Trees Lounge to the accompaniment of near-comatose piano, he announces “I don’t ever want to be happy again, I’m feeling too free. / I don’t ever want to feel something someone could steal. / But just between you and me I’m happy again again, and so terribly / ‘Cos I can’t even pretend that happiness won’t come to an end.”
In other words, he’s one of those people who speaks openly of the little wounds we all Band-Aid our souls over and shut up about: one of those people whom we handle with a little admiration, a little fear, both too intimate for comfort. Later, I’ll speak to Matt at the bar. I’ll buy him a drink when it’s my turn. We’ll spend about fifteen minutes chatting, but no more. When we part, we’ll have recognised a lot in each other; there’ll be a lot of sympathy, even. But we’ll probably not meet again. He’ll be back on the road, taking his tales of working TVs and broken relationships on to some new town and waking up fellow spirits there. I’ll go home with this album. Brief, shrugged encounter.
Matt Keating: ‘Killjoy’ Alias Records, A093 ADV (093716009320)
CD/LP album
Released: 8th April 1997 Get it from:Alias Records Matt Keating online: <
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Misfit City 