Immortal Lee County Killers
These Bones Will Rise To Love You Again
Tee Pee Records
Nashville, TN, transplants the Immortal Lee County Killers kick up an organ-thrashing, drug-crazed, lysergic garage punk frenzy with new platter These Bones Will Rise To Love You Again. I’m seeing things, not shapes and colors, but Funhouse-era Stooges ascendance, Billy Childish thrash, Spacemen 3’s church of noise and Oblivians’ grittiness. The sound is dank and sloppy, listen to those fucked lead guitar lines! Organ pedal stomp, fuzzed-out waves of British invasion guitar filtered through the Cramps, Keith Moon drums and two damned choirboy meets punk sneers; seriously their vocal harmonies are tight, fucker!
These Bones… starts off with a doubleshot of lo-fi venom: in “Turn On The Panther,” the manifesto is explicitly spelled out; “We stare into the sun” – otherworldly skronk, MC5, Quintron, Electric Eels, baby take your pick – but the Killers’ stuff seems to be a little less ummm…. tethered by linear reality now. A thin tether of feedback connects it to the bluesy romp of “Revolution Summer,” an infectious, fist-pumping, dirty rave-up that finishes the second part of their mission; it’s Pussy Galore, my friend.
“Blues” is a languid trudge through red-lit vistas of sound. Slow and blissful, drums get you in the stomach, spidery organ keeps drowning you, while a lonely harmonica sounds far off in the distance like a desert coyote. It’s space rock, baby – slurred angel falsettos, impossibly pretty and damaged. “Airliner” explodes into total T. Rextacy! I’m fucking serious, man, there’s a few lines of distorto organ verse that detonate into white light and glitter and jailbait frenzy! Yeah! “Stitched In Sin” is a deliberately fucked blues/country lament, no distractions or adornment; I’m seeing Glimmer Twins-style dissipation (but the Killers are actually from the South, so wow. Yeah.). “The Damned Don’t Cry” is a gorgeous switchblade stomp (oozing “Who Do You Love” kinda menace), with cavestomp bass drums and howls during the chorus.
Then the come-down. “Lights Down Low” bursts with the same sun-dazed fatalism of Spiritualized in their quieter moods. Only messier and more skeletal, but it’s buoyed by damn near heavenly bursts of organ (rise! rise!) that drive them out of the gutter and into the hands of their true love. Or maybe it’s the fumes. Closer “No More My Lord” is the perfect finisher after that trip, a minimal, handclaps-and-vocals only rendition of an old venerable blues, a prison holler once recorded by Alan Lomax. It’s beyond naked and the fact that the Killers pull it off, well it was a dicey proposition, but it’s beautiful and oh so sad.
Tee Pee Records: http://www.teepeerecords.com
