 |
| |
|
| |
Live Review
by SashaS
21-4-2005
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Blues Explosion damages bad taste! |
|
Live: Blues Explosion
Hammersmith Apollo, London
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Blues Explosion: usurping-enabled support
It’s three of them, the huge stage is crammed with the headliner’s gear but this threesome love to make it feel intimate, confined and hardly illuminated to play a storming 45 minute set. Blues Explosion’s onstage visuals - a massive chagrin for their label - are low-key, very much like their off-stage profile.
Blues Explosion are such huge rockers that they should be bigger than Foo Fighters. Using similar template, BX take it further, deeper, more intriguing places. Mixing in elements of punk, funk, hook-laden songs, complex arrangements and improvisations that bring body’s core-temp up for ten degrees, minimum.
Jon Spencer [pin-up looking guitarist/vocalist] leads his comrades into an attack that is punchy, soul-liberating and glandular-relieving music. There is little time to talk, and let’s face it - not their favourite activity at any time, and material is fired up and off with the timing of an Uzi. BX’s blues-inspired rockarama is often used by JC for its invention/rap-adopted routine of shouting the band’s name and its place of origin.
The New York boys - Judah Bauer on guitar and drummer Russell Simins - are one of the premier bands to come out of the city in the past 20-odd years that is still a best-kept secret. The reason is probably in JC’s unwillingness to cooperate with the media, flirt with publicity machine and, most importantly - trade-in his integrity for fame, however long or fleeting it could be. JC and his cohorts are rock-idealists, one of the last of the kind…
They are not revolutionaries in the Velvet Underground or The Stooges vein but are huge evolutionists who dissect, re-analyse and re-construct their chosen ‘libretto’. Promoting the current album ‘Damage’, they open back-catalogue for cuts from discs such as ‘Plastic Fang’ (2002) and ‘Acme’ (1998), but the response is sluggish. This is confrontational rock to which you surrender or face an issue with its cathartic quality.
The band is full tilt at it, including instrumental number and extended ‘jamming’ that leaves majority of the guitar-pop fans agog. Having shortened the name [from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion] before the current album, they remain a bass-less unit [that matters not when you’ve got powerhouse behind the drum kit] and still largely explosive - like a cola-bottle of Molotov cocktail! After them, the headlining The Hives were like dandies with limp… instruments. Some sorta time-space tourists, methinks.
Blues Explosion preserve rock’s lucidty.
SashaS
21-4-2005
Blues Explosion album ‘Damage’ is available now on Mute
|
|
|
