Mclusky
Mcluskyism
(Too Pure)
Now that I am off my meds, I can once again feel the wrecking ball of emotion, alternately flying high into the blue sky with unstoppable Cartesian fortitude only then to hit the hall with a pronounced thud, turning the wall to rubble and losing a bit of my own veneer with each crash. Is it better than a prescription cloud, who's to say, depends on what you are truing to do with your time. But in times like these, I look to certain bands to soundtrack the swinging doors banging on the sides of my psychic barn. The Fall is a good choice here, with its barked nightmares set to the steadiest tempos available, The Stooges Raw Power - albeit that band s most commercial recording still hits with a harder punch than its demon orgy sister "Fun House." Shellac fit the bil some times as well, but really, why spend all that time sifting ingredients when its all baked in a gleefully violent batshit pie in the Welsh band Mclusky.
Mclusky went largely unnoticed outside of listservs it seems, but every time they did come up, it was accompanied with glorious adulatioZ. The razor wire guitar, nutzoid vocals and lyrica, car crash percussion and over all bad-assedness made the three albums they put out in their short lifetime as classics in kicking against the pricks. (I say that, but their final missive The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not on Fire flew so low under the radar, a rabid fan like myself has yet to hear the whole thing, but the tracks I have heard showed it to have the same villainous power that McLusky Does Dallas had, and that's an album I've listened to so many time it would show up on a drug screen. But Like all beautiful creatures, life has robbed of it, and the band imploded luike everyone who cared predicted.
Too Pure and singer Andrew Falkous answered the howling wolves asking for scraps, and pulled together a 3 CD boxset of rarities, singles, outtakes, but that like the rest of their material, escapes my presence, so what I have is the single CD distillation. But we wolves are thankful for scraps. Here you have the Greatest Rock Song of All Time "Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues" panting gleaming in its eerie electric blue sweat after tearing the modern condition a new asshole, "Alan is cowboy Killer" writhing in its own adrenaline excess and quell surprise, some tender moments like the summer-melodic "She Will Only Bring You Happiness" and the methamphetamine bubblegum twist of "Rice is Nice." Should you have never heard the band, and all signs point to you being in that number, high on down one of them online stores, and try to not enact a rabid-money version of the dances from the iPod ads, gleefully jumping on car windshields and kicking trashcans into the street, and screaming with abandon "Mclusky is Dead, Long Like Mclusky." It's maybe the last bit of rock-n-roll in a Zarathustra sense, so get on it and happily bang your head on the while as the universe peters out, largely do this bands absence in it.
is an odyssey from the backwoods bars and small-town dives to the swampside dance halls and converted clapboard barns of a Louisiana Saturday Night. Don't leave Heathrow without it. His first book 
