The Main Street Gospel Love Will Have Her Revenge
Tee Pee
Blowin’ in on the winds of yesteryear is The Main Street Gospel, a country-psych band with ties to Brian Jonestown Massacre and a sound so steeped in nostalgia and tradition you gotta blow the dust off of it just to discover the true treasure it really is. Love Will Have Her Revenge, the Ohio trio’s debut, is a laid back approach to the usual foot-stomp of mustache rock, and gets its point across by way of delicate pop melodies, tin cup blues, and breezy jams. While none of the songs here are exceptionally overpowering in their virility, they do have amazing breadth, depth, and reach, like the thick roots of an old and impressive tree. Not only that, but they shake and hum at times with a journeyman vibe, as the longest songs on deck (“Fool’s Gold,” “Ready to Shine,” and “She’s a Disease”) draw you into a solitary world of lonely rural squatting and the hallucinations it might induce with their 70s-inspired freak-folk rock. You’ll be able to hear a wide array of influences on this one, like Neil Young, Wilco, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Dead Meadow, and Blood Meridian, but in the end it’s just good ol’ rock n’ roll — vulnerable, honest, heartfelt, and a tad trippy.
Check out MSG performing the title track from Love Will Have Her Revenge!
You should see it around here, man. It’s all exploding hearts and raging boners and hot sparks, which kind of sounds like a sweaty Saturday night at the steel mill, but really it’s just me on cloud nine in the rock n’ roll sky that opened up above me the second I dropped the needle on this glorious slab of coke bottle clear wax. A new C’mon record can, without much effort at all, make your entire life worth living, so the fact that it’s been three years since their last full-length, Bottled Lightning of an All Time High, means we’ve been comatose for quite awhile now. But here comes our heroic power trio, Sir Ian Blurton, Katie Lynn Campbell, and Dean Dallas Bentley, riding in on this pale horse to save the fucking day, to shock us back into coherence with their brilliantly boss fuzz n’ roll. Beyond the Pale Horse, then, is like a shot of adrenaline right into your balls, like most C’mon albums are, naturally, and like previous albums, its beauty lies in its beastly nature, its ability to shift and deviate while still remaining furiously savage. The play this time is that the electric noise is saturated in dreamy effects, and C’mon mixes some foggy, psychedelic magic in amongst their usual motor-driven madness. Dig the catchy title track and the majestically groovy – and unusually long – “Fortress of the Night” for the freakiest examples. But for sheer riffola, “Midnite is the Answer,” with its stoner crunch, is the one that pumps my blood. C’mon prove, once again, that they are almighty and untouchable.
*That’s not the record I own, but it looks just like it. Courtesy of whomever took the pic. It might’ve been Tony.
Ok, I don’t have an mp3 from the album to share (I just got it in the mail), so go buy the album from Yeah Right! to hear it for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy an older C’mon video of them washing their van and kicking it live!
Beastly Georgian trio, Blacktusk, bring hell’s hammers down heavy on their sophomore effort, Taste the Sin, like they’re taking out a whole bushel of rotten peaches in one abominable swing, splattering black juice and insidious worms all over the goddamn place. Baizley wrapped and disastrously brackish, Taste the Sin picks up where ‘08’s debut, Passage Through Purgatory, left off by heaping a whole mess of redneck rage onto the sludge metal artistry of bands like Baroness and Torche. The angry, pounding riffs burn like fire on the surface of an oily swamp and every one of the album’s 11 songs seethe and foam like acid on an open wound. Imagine the Cancer Bats with longer teeth or Zoroaster with shorter songs and you’ve got the Southern stoner death thrash of Blacktusk.
Note: I’ve seen the band’s name written several different ways, including Black Tusk and BlackTusk, but I have opted for Blacktusk. If any of the fellas in the band would like to offer up the official spelling of the band’s name, please drop me a line. Until then, I will stick with the one word, lower case ‘t’ version. For better or worse.
The Main Street Gospel
C’mon
Blacktusk