Harum Scarum

An extraordinary debut arrives just as spring begins to bite. Former members of Bikini Atoll, Joe Gideon and his sister Viva generate a guttural electric blues (‘Harum Scraum’, ‘Johan Was A Painter And An Arsonist’, ‘DOL’), but when they cast aside the Cramps/Blues Explosion/Gallon Drunk inclinations and embrace an unlikely kind of soul music, the duo really soar.
The album’s four or five talking blues story-songs, rendered in Gideon’s rough, compelling and somewhat Antipodean tones, are nothing less than stellar. Exhibit A, the driving vision-quest monologue ‘Civilization’, in which the protagonist leaves the flat earth reality of his home in order to learn the ways of man (“I was a writer, a musician, a fishmonger, a politician/I went all spastic like Lars von Trier/Wrote a book which was a spectacular success/Spent all my earnings on weed and crystal meth”). Upon returning from his odyssey, our pilgrim discharges the sum total of his distilled wisdoms for the benefit of his family: “The circumference of a circle is twice the diameter within/The centre of which the universe begins/The radius is like your aura which around you glows/The proton and the neutron know which way to go.”
There’s plenty more where that came from, including ‘Hide And Seek’, which depicts the Darwinian laws of the playground and the birthday party in vivid detail, and a testimonial for ‘Kathy Ray’, which may or may not be the true hard luck story of a backing singer who once auditioned for Ray Charles, played Live Aid with Eurythmics, and was half-blinded by her boyfriend – tragic, rousing and redemptive all at once.
But the true masterpiece is the penultimate seven minute epic ‘Anything You Love That Much You Will See Again’, halfway between the Dirty Three and Dylan, a post industrial gospel homily dressed in a leather suit and cuban heels, preaching psalms of hope and rebirth in the face of heartbreak. Righteous.

Key Track: 'Civilisation'