BEASTS OF BOURBON – little animals

(CD/LP, Bang!)

Somewhere in the outskirts, where the marshlands start, the motor of the car is being shut off and the car rolls onto gravel. Then it stops, doors slam and then the trunk is being opened. And in front of a broodingly dark blue sky with heavy weather rolling in there are five men wearing dark sunglasses looking down at you. They wear a shabby arrangement of well-selected second hand suits and old t-shirts. Blue Jeans all of them, but none of them for the looks. One is wearing a cowboy hat, one of them is holding a shovel and the other the biggest pair of steel pliers you have ever seen. Shit, looks like your last day won’t end too good.

Yes, the Beasts of Bourbon are back. As hateful, distilled and distorted as ever. If you liked to hang out in alternative rock pubs (of course, they weren’t called that back then, they were called whatever their name was because apart from the two or three of them in every city with more than a million dwellers, there weren’t not much more places you could go to) and drink beer and listen to the newest imports of rock music, then you know them. A friend of mine once described them as even more “bleauurgh” than Tom Waits and he meant something like downtrodden, evil, underground, dirty, gritty, bare-boned distorted. The stories about this band and what they did whenever they hit Vienna are legendary. Of the women baring their breasts to get some primordial attention of Tex Perkins, the drinking sprees. I think there are still some photographs of them visiting a local record store pinned to the office walls of said store. And you know that they are not a band, but much more an attitude. So it doesn’t matter that Kim Salmon and Boris Sudjovic aren’t with the band anymore. There is Australian age old guitar legend Charlie Owen with them, after all. It doesn’t matter that Tex Perkins never stopped doing songwriter albums that ranged between depressed country music and downright depressing blues folk. That Tex, Don and Charlie album with Charlie Owen and Don Walker sure was a great surprise when I found it in 2005 and the shotgun, razorblade, guitar imagery on the cover was a giveaway to this one here. He switches the button and with the first boom of guitars, drums and bass on the first song he is back in gear:

One bang and he goes: “I used to give my money to the motherfucking poor / but I don’t care about nothing anymore.” His gravely, whiskey-drenched, evil snarl of singing gives it all away. Beasts of Bourbon, right here and now. On “The beast I came to be” he makes it clear: “I came here on my own, out of the great unknown, this passion kept me going, to cul what I despise.” It doesn’t matter that all of the heavy songs are in the same arrangement and sound – a live show would be the same – and that it is hard to find out if one or two songs have gone by when in a pub drinking and this record is going by in the back. Because they all rock. Not like a rock band, but like a big hunk of stone. A stone as big that people would make a national monument out of it. And Australians really do. Yes, the riff of “Sleepwalker” sounds oddly familiar and so does the riff and melody of “Master and Slave”. Who cares? It is heavy, rough, with enough edges and teeth to chew you up and spit you out.

They might put two slower songs with a balladesque feeling in there, but their sentiments are betrayed by what is being sung: “Little animals”, the bemoaning of the fate of all those wonderful little animals is being ironized by contrasting the adjectives cuddly and friendly with tasty and useful. And does the line “they say it’s a new day, while the delay goes ahead, today was a replay, of the new day of the dead” sound exactly optimistic to you? On the final song they nevertheless round ‘em up with a cool round of thank you’s to all the good things and that includes drugs and alcohol as well as broken hearts and good times. A record ending song only tested by “Rest in peace” (from: “Black Milk” one of the most underrated Beasts-Albums of all time) for ten best songs ending a record. A song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards spent a decade in the Seventies trying to write but never managed because it seemed too simple.

Ten songs is all they need. Ten songs and not one more is enough to infuse me with a dose of energy as I haven’t had in a long time. Of course it is partly nostalgia, partly a reviving of lost youth and partly the dirt and grit that accumulated in my teet over the more than a decade that this band has been lost in a vortex. Why does it have to be a bunch of old men that gives me that kick rather than any kind of young band? (I have to be careful not to find myself inside that trunk and Tex Perkins and the guys explaining what they think of music critics with the help of some blunt implements.) Why do these men instantly feel respectable and honest and real as opposed to a run down fuck-all like Pete Doherty or the superficiality and hollowness of the current posterboy band? Well, I don’t care. I don’t care anymore. You want something from me, pay me a beer at least before you whine up your story.

The vinyl version has snake skin printing on the cover.