Edie Sedgwick
Her Love Is Real… But She Is Not
DeSoto Records
Edie Sedgwick is not the doomed Warhol starlet. Edie Sedgwick is the glam-fuelled, trash-slut-tastic, drag fetish reinvention/reincarnation of one Justin Moyer (could it get any better than this?), formerly a musician of some repute with Antelope and El Guapo. But no matter for the past, Moyer is dead (can a Moyer ever truly die though?), and in his place stands the fifty-foot queenie of Edie Sedwick, makeup, shoes and outfit totally immaculate, and it goes without saying, gorgeous. We stand at a strange temporal crossroads in underground/electronic music now, a rift in the space/time continuum has caused the spirit of departed divas to inhabit the bodies of outsider musicians – at the moment we have another Donna Summer, a new Josephine Baker and now Edie Sedgwick! Something must be amiss? Yes, that something is Her Love Is Real…. But She Is Not, Sedgwick’s deranged manifesto that takes the form of nothing less than an all-out electro assault on the state of celebrity at the dawn of the 21st Century.
Yup. It’s a concept album. Of sorts. Each of the fourteen songs that make up Her Love Is Real… But She Is Not is named after a modern celebrity of some repute (Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osmont, Lucy Liu, Michael J. Fox), with the lyrics then providing a skewed take on one of their films – for instance, the “Sixth Sense” referencing “Haley Joel Osment”: “A boy who knew as sure as shit he saw the dead” – but also using these films and public personages as jumping off points for ever stranger flights of fancy and oblique cultural commentary. Though Arnold Schwarzenegger gets two. Natch. These rants and cloaked tributes are backed up by an unholy mélange of electro body music, funk and left-of-centre indie noisemongering that calls to mind the Unicorns, Suicide, Bobby Conn and, over all else, the satanic disco of A Daisy Chain 4 Satan-era My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Check out how “Sigourney Weaver” somehow changes the plot of “Aliens” to that of a gynocentric porn film backed by sleazy synth stabs and pounding drum machines. But for every funk-fortified Erasure-on-crack moment like “Michael J. Fox,” there’s a trawl into 20th century eccentrica like the wax-cylinder-music-hall sendup of “Arnold Schwarzenegger I” or the primitive motorik of “Sally Field.” Life-affirmingly weird and proof positive that the last name Moyer is the gateway to genius. As if you needed any more?
DeSoto Records: http://www.desotorecords.com
