This terminal madness came to light thanks to a pint of Hot 100 and a jimson weed cigar I smoked one Tuesday night in the parking lot of the Cork and Bottle liquor store down in Cortez, CO. I had decided to visit the big city on a lark, maybe catch a movie, and next thing I know there I am in Towaoc, locked down in the detention center smack dab in the middle of the Ute reservation for a buncha things I don’t remember doing. Uncle Dave showed up to bail me out. He weren’t really my uncle; He was Uncle Dave to everyone in the whole damn county. We hopped into his cherry red Trans-Am, blazed a trail back to the pinto bean fields with Sixteen Horsepower wailing away on the hi-fi while he ground his teeth hard and took them corners like pills.
We got home, and I went out back to have a smoke and look at the stars. Soon as I exhaled these three shapes come right up outta the dirt, just sort of lurching towards me. I wasn’t sure if they were scarecrows come to life, skinwalkers or just a datura encore, but one of them hands me a burlap bag and then fwoomp; They all just melt. I went back inside and dumped out the bag to find a CD, some cassettes, and a bunch of books by John Fante. I started listening, and reading, and damned if I couldn’t stop.
Sure, it’s about as lo-fi as a wood stove being used to heat up your underwear on a dark winter morn, but some of that Denver Sound unceremoniously mounted the baggy Manchester vibe right there on my floor and out popped a cross-eyed little homunculus named Bandini, who was actually Naughty Monkey before they all died and somehow came back to life. Call it what you want; unpolished, inbred, upsetting and funky as a snake humpin’ a skunk, but it’s like the 90’s came back to life and were belchin’ a Waldorf salad of fire and fear into this lost and lonely world. Everything from the VU to Tom Waits to Pixies to Dinosaur Jr. seemed to have shown up and whispered dirty words in these boys’ ears while they wrote and recorded all of this. Dolores County ain’t seen nothin’ comparable since Steal Moon played out at the dump back in ‘92 with a diesel generator, and then Todd S. drove his truck headfirst into that arroyo right off the south side of 666. That was the end of that, but this here seems like some kind of second coming.
This 4-track release from 2017 called “Sable” was pretty much an instrumental introduction with a torn-off toenail of a hint that maybe they could write some lyrics, maybe sing. Then after Naughty Monkey done burned up and Bandini come risin’ up from the ashes, this other eponymous beast got made in 2018 to verify that notion. I mean, fuck; For an old man coping with the old-testament trials of living in Mud Creek these two records pretty much convinced me that not all kids who played music nowadays were complete pieces of shit, and that maybe rock ‘n roll still had a fightin’ chance. There’s a lot of Brian Jonestown Massacre in there, some Pavement, and for sure they know who Guided By Voices is. They have a sound and an aura that has possessed me outright and led me to advocate on their behalf even though I haven’t even really met these folks on the terrestrial plane. Anytime I go with an overly heroic dose they seem to show up outta nowhere and hand me something that just bewilders the living shit outta my dirt-bound soul, and now I feel obligated to share the lot of it with whoever will listen, because it’s that gawdamn good. These here are my chronicles of our odd relationship.
-Sven Gossard Oliver, Mud Creek, CO. 2020