THE BONNEViLLES - Arrow Pierce My Heart

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The Bonnevilles new hit record, Arrow Pierce My Heart, starts with a haunting, lo-fi, acapella prayer called The Bells of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling, a WWI British airmen's song, and it segues into a mono fade to stereo bomb drop guitar tone that rocks like the sound of Howlin' Wolf's 1969 amplifier rolling off the top of his station wagon. No Law In Lurgan, is a monster garage super rock boogie that sets the tone for the album. The Bonnevilles have sent notice: They ain't fuckin' around.

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My Dark Heart is track two. A blues shouter you'll be blasting on a late afternoon flat-black motorcycle ride straight into the sun.

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Track three, The Whiskey Lingers tells it like it is, if you like your liquor amber. A deeply grooving blues, it shows they've absorbed some Tupelo rock, a little North Mississippi trance action, and throttled it all thru a Nirvana/Stooges filter...wholly unavoidable, like The Beatles filter, it's in the air and in the water. Hold on! Singer/songwriter/guitarist Andrew McGibbon shines incredibly bright on this slab of blues rock implosion. Plucking, swinging, rolling. tumbling, sliding, grinding, McGibbon sails here...the performance...like the rainbow in a great glass of Rye whiskey, is stellar.

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I don't know if The Electric Company is a metaphor for something or not. Maybe the dude in the song worked for The Electric Company ...and while on the job liked to "Get drunk! Get high! Get Some!" and more. Whatever. I don't know about all you, but I say hail! Flip the switch, and rock it, y'all. #ItsTooLateToDieYoung

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Title song Arrow Pierce My Heart (#5) has Andy McGibbon playing an insistent, garagey tribal country spaghetti western surf guitar creep that transmogrifies into a feedback-breathing UFO-driven beast, hackles up. You'll be looking in the rearview mirror to see if McGibbon's guitar solo is catching up to you. Skinsman Chris McMullan gets a solid high-five for his hard slapping, one-driving-shoe-on-the-gas, one-boot-on-the-brake-drumming. #Wicked #OnPoint #Work

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Song six is Eggs And Bread, a short, beautifully picked gallows song that speaks to the eternalness of love and the blues. That is all.

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Lucky seven is I Dreamt of The Dead. It rocks. Hard. I'm thinking McGibbon (who produced the album) has some serious power-pop off-shoots from his blues roots. You'll hear some Dan Auerbachness in McGibbon's vocals, or maybe it's just his Northern Irish soul shining, either way, if you had the opportunity you'd buy this song as a 45, and keep flipping it over to play:

#8 - We've all felt it. You've weathered all manner of storms for a taste of love, and you fail it. Sing along: I've Come Too Far For Love To Die.

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Erotica Laguna Lurgana is an instrumental intermission that takes you through the steamy, sultry sub-tropical rainforests, and wild west deserts of Lurgan, Northern Ireland. It will set you to whistling, again.

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The Man With An X Shaped Scar On His Cheek tells the tale of just that. Not all the details, just the essentials. A roots-rock banjo-slugged chugger with a terrific, dark melody and driving rhythm...it runs just shy of a three-minute short story and teaches in its essence:
#Bewareofdarkhairedgirls
#Ringsofgoldcanlosetheirrubystone
#Beware

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Song #11 is Those Little Lies :

lie
lī/
noun
noun: lie; plural noun: lies
1. an intentionally false statement.
"Mungo felt a pang of shame at telling Alice a lie"

intransitive verb
1a : to be or to stay at rest in a horizontal position : be prostrate : b : to assume a horizontal position —often used with down C : archaic : to reside temporarily : stay for the night : lodge d : to have sexual intercourse —used with with e : to remain inactive (as in concealment)
2: to be in a helpless or defenseless state
3: Rotten fruits on harvest day

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Number twelve!
Learning To Cope is a wailer, a wall of gnarly Stooges soul garage punk blast... imagine The Undertones squad up with The Clash to produce The Cramps, and The Afghan Whigs cover it. Drummer Chris McMullan is a monster robot, destroying everything in his path...and doing it locked in. Another Bonnevilles song that'd make a great 45.
#compactknottedhardkicker
#Peoplesaddenedbythedeathofthejimjonesrevue
#Fuckyeahhandclaps

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Song Thirteen, baby.

The closer.
Who Do I Have To Kill To Get Out of Here?
The Bonnevilles start the album with a prayer, and close it with a post-grunge howl, a thumping anthem for something we can't imagine, that we all fear is coming because of what we've done...and all that's missing is a bottle of George Dickel, a horn section...and a longer fade out.

If you're one of those who, for some reason, felt
disenfranchised after the first two Black Keys albums, or maybe the first one even, and that's not meant to slag on The Bk's...some folks feel that way. Whatever. But you'll never deny the influence, bad and world-wide...or maybe you're still bemoaning the loss of The White Stripes, then you must rock out The Bonnevilles' new album, Arrow Pierce My Heart.

The Bonnevilles, like The BK's, are flavourful muthrs. They know their rock and blues deeply, but they've absorbed it, made it their own, and mutated it, rather than wearing it like a dress-up badge or a special hat.

The Bonnevilles are their own thing. Post-grunge blues-infected rock and post-Fat Possum-infected-punkass blues dressed up in new suits and fightin' boots, like city folks, but dusty with Irish country soul. They're stadium rockers at the corner pub, they're the band you wish someone would play for you when you think no one knows how to rock anymore. They're probably what you've been waiting for.

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MUDLOW - SAWYERS HOPE

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My new favorite album comes from one of my favourite bands in the universe. Mudlow, from the English seaside city of Brighton, asked me to write the liner notes for Sawyer's Hope and I was honored to do so.  My notes are below followed by a song by song interpretation.


Thomas Wolfe wrote that  “...our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung.”  If that sliver of catholic prose had a soundtrack it would be played by Brighton UK’s Mudlow.

Mudlow plays literate southern music without continent, drifting and fraught with terroir.  It is at once humid, torrid, and familiar; a wholly indecent sound.  It’s the grist, gristle and grit of the hard luck life.  Noir skies meet muddy boots.  The old trouble. 

Tobias plays guitar, howls and sings, winks like Popeye and writes songs.  The stalwart Matt Latcham plays drums, craftsman Paul Pascoe plays bass and records the music.  Sullen sweetheartist Paul Trimble blows the saxophone. 

Named for a particular island off the western edge of downtown South Purgatory, sitting hard by a slow-burning swamp just down the road from the old General Tire factory (long abandoned).  Port-side stands a tough and brazen little burlesque bar, lit like a set from Twin Peaks.  It’s there, downstairs, framed by smoke-rimed red velvet curtains that Mudlow swing their craft. 

They play cool, cruel and criminal, lounged and louched versions of Frank’s Wild Years at The Stooges Funhouse for love-worn ghosts, sinewy butchers and Gutter Twins, as a sway-backed barmaid, mouth full of gold and skin scented of hyssop, serves marked cards and moonshine to lost North Sea sailors, southern kings, and their curs. 

Their music is the soundtrack for a film as yet unimagined, the saxophoned theme to a tempest-tossed and dreamless sleep.  Night hues meet dawn of day in salt air and sea light.  A morphine blues follows a sloe gin waltz. 


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Taut, violet-tinged boozy fanfares mingle with mad juke joint hoe-downs.  Foghorned and rainsoaked Waitsian tinklers hear the music the dust makes on the soles of shoes at the bottom of a lurched and half-hidden staircase.  Run until you fall.

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A Brighton-By-The Mississippi boogie shakes it down till it stays down.
 A leaf-sprung and primered F150 on a rainslick Hove country road.
 Lights out.  Listening.  No second chances.

3
Your last call after last call.  A lonely saxophone cries from an empty bridge. Jake-legged and sodden, one arm around your new true-love’s waist.  You got some fight left in you yet.  Roll ‘em!

4
Ghosts shine darkly with your energy.  Faded howls and ringing bells.
 The chrome groove digs underground.  Cave-like.

5
Troubles are trawling for good times.
They’ll find them alright.
Down by the boathouse.

6
Zane Merite.  Queen of something, somewhere south of south Louisiana.  Or Borneo.  Rusted-through boats and bodies, hot tropical rain wails in the blood-colored night sky.

7
A slow ballroom blues dance spin,
toe properly turned out.

8
Hooker’s heat and boogie,
the tight Memphis night air.
Don’t get too close to the water.

9
Soil. It’ll hold it.

10
Sitting under the power-line giants above the Snake River canyon at full-moon midnight.  The air fairly crackles.  The dirt lit shades of white and black.  Below, along the riverbank, the primal shadows of bodies lit by bonfire sway low to the echo of deep, dank grooves.  Sparks fly, only to be carried by the cool wind as it slips behind the moon which moves its way down the deep, sensual and ancient valley.

Somewhere a back-door slams, unknown voices cross. Blue/white light hypnotizes down the highway.  Footsteps scuffle in the raw heat.  Love spelled wrong, backwards and reborn.

SAWYER'S HOPE by Mudlow

Free Album of Mudlow Odd & Ends & Rareities:

THE LAST RUNG DOWN TO HELL by Mudlow

Voluminous Thank-Yous! go to April Fecca, boss/editor for NowThisSound, for being a rubber wall to bounce sentences off, without whom this post wouldn't have been worth a tinker's damn.

BLOOD ON THE SCRATCHPLATE '65!

I'm busy writin' and listenin' but will have some some new stabs at slabs to preview soon. Til then check out this re-run of my review of the Motor Sounds Records compilation Blood On The Scratchplate '65!

MOTOR SOUNDS RECORDS ARTiSTS ViDEOS!

This sooper high octane 21 track hunk o'punkass garage blues lo-fi rockness hails from dirty durty Northern Ireland and it kills and kills again. 21 times it kills. I just love a record label that you can trust and so far Motor Sounds Records is just that. Like SST Records in the olden days Andy McGibbon's Motor Sounds knows it's thang and knows it well. Chunky hunks of greasy garage rawk squawk vs sexy Joe Da Grinder D-troit R n' B vs Bargain basement fuzz bomb freakouts. Some of y'all know the garagecentric Nuggets box sets and Children of Nuggets. This is like the unknown reform school delinquent brother of Nuggets who doesn't get to come over much 'cuz he's always kicking the collective asses of the Children of Nuggets. Feels he owes it to 'em. Thinks maybe it'll teach 'em a lesson for being such a precious little prigs. Eleven bands from Ireland, Italy, Belgium, England, Japan and the good ol' USA throwing down the State of the garage rawk Union. You get two likker fueled hump infested tracks from Brighton's Mudlow (who just happen to be one of my fave bands in the whole damned universe and who will be stealing yr girlfriends and smashing yr boyfriends guitar at The Deep Blues Festival (their first U.S. appearence!) this summer), two tracks by Andy McGibbon's own spectrafrknsonic Bonevilles (known as The Motorsounds on this set)(and who is this guy? the Diddy of Lurgan?), UKs The Surgens bring their next century northern england hillbilly sex thrash party two times, Detroit and now Brooklyn's Rock and Roll Monkey And The Robots bring a couple super teen titan odes and anti-odes to their twin anti-heroes (and mine!) Ann Arbor's Shakey Jake Woods and James Dean. Fukuoka Japan's fuzzbomb fans The Routes shake it two times too. Belgium's Secret Agent Men rock-out so good one might never guess they were Belgian. Hey I knew a girl from Belgium and she ate A LOT of meat. It makes sense. Dublin's The Urges bless and beat us with The Urges Theme while Italys' Super Sexy Boy 1986 touch you two times in the places that are covered by yr bathing suits with Columbian Lover as well as Golden Hole. Belfast's The Tupelo Incident hit it one time but it seems like twice...it was that good baby! Their fellow Belfastian's The Keepers groove down two speaker destroyers one of which is a flaming farfisafied melt down. I havn't been fan of compilation albums for ages on account of the sinple fact that since punk rock died it's first death most compilations i've come across sucked. But this set brings back the glory days of Rodney on the Roq, Hell Comes to Your House, Radio Tokyo Tapes, and the comps that New Alliance, Mystic and SST put out. Really strong stuff that well reminds me that the rock sure as hell ain't even close to dead. You got Motor Sounds Records to thank and blame for that.

Buy Blood On The Scratchplate '65 HERE!