Saturday, February 9, 2008

Outsideleft: The Future of the Left is Better than the Now of Everything Else


Future of the Left
Curses
(Too Pure)

I have a fondness for hilarious bluntness. Like the exhortations of characters in John Waters movies, or the thought of conking someone on the skull with a ball-peen hammer – the bluntness gets me. It’s hard to find a wrecking ball with a sense of humor in popular music – bombast usually get channeled in the service of image maintenance or expressions of dissatisfaction with institutions impervious the messages directed at them; wasted energy, man. It’s like wooing a woman who is clearly uninterested.

McLusky was a Welsh band that offered an alternative vent for all that pent-up rage, spooling out lines like our love is bigger than your love and (my favorite) you’re turning me on with your lightsabre cocksucking blues. Their brief period on this sphere is documented on a trio of brilliantly titled records: My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours, , and The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not on Fire and a boxed-set succinctly labeled McLuskyism. Each offered relentless torrents of grinding rawk hatched from a three way involving The Fall, Mission of Burma and Helmet. Lead singer and guitarist Andrew Falkous often sounded like he was being stretched like a canvas over the band’s frame, a taut impenetrable surface on which smears and scrawls become art. Any structure can only maintain its tensile pressures as long as all parts are in concert, and alas their bassist John Chapple left to form Shooting at Unarmed Men, a band with which I am wholly unfamiliar. Read more...

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