The Primevals. Dislocation. Triple Wide

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Primevals DislocationVeteran Glasgow rockers, The Primevals, have been hellbent for over 30 years in their quest to keep the heart of garage band rock’n’blues pumping, a task with which they have been spectacularly successful as they maintain their renaissance which began with 2011’s Disinhibitor after a fallow period at the beginning of the century. While their early contemporaries such as The Gun Club and The Cramps have gone the way of all things, Disinhibitor saw a revitalised band roar back into form and it was quickly followed by Heavy War and Tales Of Endless Bliss, both again superb slices of sound that, to coin a phrase, were groovetastic. Psychedelic swirls, evil slide guitar and hypnotic riffs all bundled into one very fine trip.

Dislocation is no disappointment as it sets its sights firmly on its antecedents with the band firing on all barrels. The twisting snarly slide guitar that kicks off the opening song Fever Zone serving notice that we’re back in Swampland on a classic Primevals’ song with singer Michael Rooney raving towards the end over the rushed beat and psychedelic organ. I Got Strong speeds along with a Seeds like velocity, the band pumping like adrenalized muscle tissue while Boho Baby is a Doors’ like seedy walk on a wild side, a vampish twilight zone of sputtering guitars and panther like stealth. All three songs are excellent and delivered with such a freewheeling ease that one imagines that the band and Rooney (who writes all the songs) could probably knock them off in their sleep, so ingrained in their musical DNA is this primal urge. However one of the delights of The Primevals is their ability to switch gears mid song, jump from garage rock to free jazz, localise a song or just freely associate and all of these come to play throughout the album.

East Campbell Street Breakdown opens with a brief lofi blaxploitation soundtrack soundalike before they go into a burnished speed riff not too far removed from Blue Oyster Cult as Rooney hones in on the plight of Glasgow’s homeless community.  Cuckoo Clocks, Chocolate And LSD manages the task of wedding Orson Wells, Forrest Gump and Albert Hoffman in a paranoid welter of scrambled vocals and razor sharp guitar scything. Meanwhile The Jump From Real To Weird adds trumpet from Robert Henderson over a pummelling riff as Rooney riffs on the lyrics almost scatting. Throughout the album the guitars of Tom Rafferty and Martyn Roger slash and burn but it’s in the frenetic Pleasures Past that they really excel as, apart from a short solo burst from one of them, they buzz and swarm like a pack of hornets. Slow Drip (a Rooney/Rafferty co-write) allows Rooney’s harmonica to add a crazed Yardbirds like R’n’B frenzy to the middle eight over some neat wah wah guitar and they close the album with another co write (with Richard Mazda) on another mighty example of Primevals music, a huge slab of noise, the guitars feral with Rooney in the throes of spiders in his bed hallucinations.

All in all Dislocation blasts the cobwebs from your ears  with the band again staking their claim to be the prime purveyors of swampy garage rock and the album is dedicated to the late Stewart Cruickshank who did so much to promote Scottish rock bands. The Primevals have an album launch gig this Friday at Glasgow’s Hug & Pint and it’s bound to be a great night of hi-octane sweaty rock’n’roll.

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Heid: The T. F. Arnott Story

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Here’s an oddity, the description alone commands attention and demands a listen.

“….. fragments of a long lost more extensive piece of work by a radio documentarian about a delta blues guy called T. F. Arnott. It tells the story of his strange and deeply twisted career and how it spanned throughout the better part of the 20th century. First spotted as a talent scout in Hollywood in the mid thirties he appears throughout the ages, meeting folk like Elvis, Richard Feynman, and even Bill Clinton along the way. “

The album is the demented brainchild of T. F. Arnott (described as a “Blues Player, Poet, Theoretical Physicist, Hollywood Mogul, Alligator Hunter and also Glaswegian”) who recalled his younger days when he and his chums would record improvised radio comedy programmes on his mum’s tape player. Now grown up (allegedly) he’s spun this fantasy (with the assistance of Kerr McClure, Isaac Wilcox, Marcus Montgomery Roche and Peter Arnott) and unleashed it on an unsuspecting world.

It’s great fun. The album consists of acoustic blues songs for the post part interspersed with snippets of documentary commentary from various characters recalling the career of T. F. Arnott. These range from Shaky Mo (a doppelganger for Camberwell carrot Danny from Withnail & I) describing Arnott’s 1967 spell in London where he recorded “Twelve songs about Sausages” (” great title, crap record”), to the owner of Florida’s Crocodile Club who went hunting in the Everglades with Arnott, killed a manatee and tried to make a guitar case out of its skin. Failing to do so they eventually fashioned a hat instead. There’s episodes involving The Manhattan Project, Jean Paul Sartre’s sex club and Arnott’s in setting up Sun Records which he originally called Bum Records. Sure, it’s juvenile at times but there’s many chuckles contained herein, a bit like listening to Cheech and Chong recording Blind Melon Chitlin Lemon while watching Spinal Tap.

As for the music, some of it is excellent. There’s a fine Glaswegian take on How Come My Dog Don’t Bark (recorded by Dr. John among others) retitled How Come My Dog Dinnie Bark. Cry recalls the works of Hamish Imlach with wonderful woozy Glaswegian backing vocals, Don’t Ya Call Me sounds like an angry west of Scotland John Lee Hooker while there’s a lighter take on the blues with the toe tapping and memorable Magic Band. Overall it’s great fun, not to be taken too seriously (the legend himself confided to Blabber’n’Smoke “it’s just a wee DIY type affair”) but for the grand price of £2 you can download it and judge for yourself.

Buy it here

Eugene Twist. The Boy Who had Everything.

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A debut album from a Glasgow singer and songwriter is something that happens almost every week these days. It’s been some time however since we’ve heard anything as unique and well crafted as this offering from Eugene Twist. Everything from the Dickensian name to the packaging and the production of the music reeks of quality and then there’s the music. A sumptuous collection of songs that are almost orchestral in their delivery with a hint of the chanson stylings of the late Jacques Brel as delivered by Scott Walker. A touch misleading perhaps as Twist doesn’t actually sound like Brel (or Walker) but the drama, the big occasion, the sweeping vistas are all here. You might want to call it baroque pop.
The album opens with a frenzied sax driven New York noire jazz sound with Latin undertones on If There’s Love Where I’m Going. A cracking start where Twist’s boho lyrics could easily be steaming from underground grates in NY or Paris, nighttime subterranean poetry reaching for air. The song is delivered with the force of a hurricane. Unfortunately the other songs don’t approach the sheer gusto of the opener but they all have their moments. Twist writes well in a surrealistic style, half Breton, half Lear and delivers his lyrics with a sardonic air, able to sound tender or tough. His ballads such as Tough Act To Follow and Actress On A Mattress are dreamlike swoons with delicate pillowings of guitars and keyboards on a somnambulistic outing. The tittle song starts off with this shimmering sense before a crashing guitar breaks in the song left turns into a Bad Seeds fantasy. It’s Down To You has a slight touch of Dylan with its whirling organ sound while Gauguin is a soaring pop song that has hooks aplenty and a sixties jet sound that is simply fabulous.
A multi layered album in its lyrics and instrumentation this repays repeated listens and grows each time and presents its author as a major talent. He could be huge, in the meantime however he’s still gigging around Glasgow so perhaps it would be well to catch him soon.

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