Blues Explosion: the ultra-rocking bro’hood

Criticism is a series of put-downs by a talent-free wannabe, ‘mini-Me’ argued the other day. Well, it was just another page of a continual update on the doctrine of natural extinction. There are rich and there are powerful individuals, there are celebrities, there is populace and there are the modern weirdoes - the learned. Intellectuals have become the last eccentrics.

Each individual is a vessel that needs to be filled with products of cerebral agriculture. We should harvest ideas and not things we can’t take… In our search for altruism we avoid any kind of truth but are in the pursuit of happiness that is of fiscal nature. In the McLuhan/Warholian realm of publicity/bling-warfare, with everything [including periods and constipations] known about everyone, 15 seconds of fame is available to anyone stupid enough to appear on reality-TV. People behave like their brains are deceased organs.

Imagine facing St Peter: he is a quiz-master of ‘Who wants to be a Heavenaire?’ There are no right answers, no prizes, there are no right ideas but accounting for personal ‘art of living’… And it has been - nought much to shout about. Pre-arranged familiarity and triteness: no nous, no ploughing of new fields of imagination.

Making one wonder constantly - what’s the point when majority of earthlings believe in fairytales all their lives? From a tooth-fairy to a celestial Shangri-la? Yep, human credos are based on fiction, nay - lies, and the less you know the more you believe. Our governments know what’s good for us: ignorance, augmented by binge-soaking of senses, is the way to contentment that may be interrupted by some urban disturbance but not a revolution. An elongated stale-mate…

Rebel rousers! Blues Explosion, formerly Jon Spencer B/E, have been opposing the banality of charts for such a long time they should be the champions of all the people who made The White Stripes such huge selling artisans. As a matter of fact, they defined Jack’n’Meg sound, with an extra guitar, a decade ago.

Blues Explosion’s new album may be entitled ‘Damage’ but they are not so much damaged as removed from pop’s diurnal shoving of facileness down our throats. The BX members may increasingly look like characters in a revisionist Western - sharp card-hand in a waist-coat flanked by two chavs [to use the buzz-word de moment] - but they speak the Rock‘n‘Roll language with internal understanding.

It ranges from bluesy, murky sound, the rock-showdown: from Southern boogie to doom-laden ballads, encapsulating The Stones at their laziest-best, The Velvet Underground at their most wasted, as well as getting really tribal, primal, sexual… to dirty bar-blues. “I wanna… Scream,” intones Jon Spencer who still remains the focus although the outfit halved their name. Later on, the entire auditorium goes chanting “Judah Bauer”!

These Blues-ers may not be breaking the walls of tradition but it is nice, tidy and cultivated around its base; they are keen gardeners. Not all is static there because they also drop in an experimental section - complex, fractured improvisations - that leave many with puzzled faces. During these looser moments the outfit lowers to the secular level for the difference of the obligatory pious aura of yesteryear.

If BX were ever to form a label, may I suggest a name - DisTone?

Blues Explosion reminds us that life is a freedom road until you hit that crash-barrier someone idiotically build across the highway.