Sons & Daughters - 'Taste The Last Girl' (Domino)
4/5
By: Michael Lewin
So, here we all are, sitting in a barn a little way outside Nashville. It's deepest night, there are more stars than we ever realised we would ever see. And the barn is lit by candles which are flickering and just ever so slightly insufficient. We're sitting on haystacks and the air is musty. We've all just been to Johnny Cash's funeral, right, and in honour of him we're all in finest, tassled black shoes and trousers covered in dust from a trek up country roads, wide-brimmed preacher hats, drunk to hell on bourbon, and Lucinda Williams turned us down when we propositioned her. We sure as hell don't want any brooding, introspective mourning any more; we want to celebrate. We want to dance ecstatic to punk'd up, plugged-in, country-garage murder ballads about things like killing hookers in shabby motels; we want to really goddamn feel being alive and gothic and soaked in whiskey and we'll shake our hips and brawl and forget everything in music and despairing exhilaration. It's a feeling we'll never quite achieve again; it'll be fleeting and raucous because of it, and we'll love every single second.
We'd need a particular kind of music for this, a particular kind of song. We'd need something that sounds like having our lip bust from the right hook of a hefty farm-worker, that has straw in its hair and a cheeky flushed look from having dirty sex in a field. Music that's completely obsessed with death and Nick Cave and because it refuses not to live a real life, that sounds like it's been chased out of town, spent time in jail for vagrancy and spent time in saloons being far, far from sober; music that's been in bar brawls and has the scars to prove it, music that lost a true love and a brightly burning innocence far too young. Music that has a street knowledge, that's born of scruffy kids in cities who remember Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, that reminds us of John Ford making a disenfranchised noir starring the Duke and Clint with dead-of-night, world-weary, back-alley stories.
It'd have an immediate, nagging guitar jangle to make us jump and shout, and we'd want staccato piano riffs and hard, repetitive and jerky drumming to keeps us not just tapping our feet but stamping the solid ground beneath us flat all night, until our soles throbbed and ankles and shins ached. We'd want doo-wop vocal hooks of nah-nah-nahs and oh-woahs, and we'd need a femme fatale with the voice of a young brothel madame cooing at us. We'd need sudden stop-start dynamics to keep us wide-awake and slightly frantic, jerking shoulders and twitching limbs, and by this point we'd demand the most jubilant, neck-hair raising guitar squiggles Joey Santiago forgot to put on 'Surfer Rosa' underlining this unrelenting choruses that buzz through our bodies. What we'd want is country-rock translated through an urban noir, then, with some peculiarly danceable feel, and we probably wouldn't expect it to come from Glasgow. Like most of the brief, sharp tracks from 'The Repulsion Box', 'Taste the Last Girl' implores us to soundtrack our unusual nights of dark revelry and melancholy with something that will elevate and evoke in us feelings and places that certainly aren't quite... mundane. Not a single for every occasion, then, but more suitable for a wild'n'rowdy ho-down at midnight than any others out this month.
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