Lords – This Ain’t A Hate Thing, It’s A Love Thing
(Gringo Records, 2006)

My appreciation of this album has been a long time coming. I think it may even be a 2005 release, I dunno, but let’s call it 2006. That’s no slur on the album anyway, more a diss on my own slow-witted listening habits. First time I heard the Lords record was on a car stereo on the way to All Tomorrow’s Parties, the last time I went to that (definitely ’06). Obviously I clocked that it rocked; y’know, good, heavy solid stuff, British band who really know their shit etc. Subsequently bought it, on sale in HMV no less, played it a couple of times through weedy computer speakers. Yeah, sounds alright. Thumbs up. But it wasn’t until about a month or so ago, muscling through crowds on East London streets on the first really cold weekend of the winter with the EQ on my mp3 player cranked, that it hit me how much this album ROCKS. Y’know, in capitals. Overenthusiastic website capsule review style! So let’s have a go at a proper review;

Drawn from the ranks of the Gringo Records centred British post-hardcore (for want of a better term?) scene, wherein men are men, and most of them like to spend their time dragging tormented, ear-splitting angularities from their instruments in the tradition of Fugazi /Shellac/Rodan et al, Lords bring to bear all of the full-blooded, muscular musicality such a background suggests, and then some. But crucially, Lords are doing things differently. Ditching the cold, cerebral feeling that can often make inventive, heavy guitar music such a punishing listen, Lords are digging deeper into their collective understanding of music and the things that make it good and… well to not put too fine a point on it, Lords are playing the blues. Not in the sense of dredging up some bunch of refried boogie clichés and half-assed generic signifiers, but just by harnessing their musical vocabulary to the cause of belting out thunderous, joyous odes to crazed, ugly life, with spirit and guts and all the rest of it.

Specifically, whether by accident or design, I reckon Lords are sailing close to a certain strain of ‘70s British outsider blues, somewhere between the wall of noise and blustering sincerity of the early Edgar Broughton Band through to the “just because we’re prog doesn’t mean we’re pussies” grandeur of The Groundhogs. Another inescapable reference point here is good ol’ Captain Beefheart, or rather The Magic Band, as spidery Zoot Horn Rollo guitar figures creep and crawl beneath the primary swing of the riffs and brutal, bebop-like stop/start dynamics keep the mama-heartbeat at bay. A touch of Beefheart-via-Broughton is identifiable in the vocals too, but thankfully not TOO much. With nobody in the band cut out to be a natural powerhouse blues splutterer, Lords singer exhibits a kind of strangulated, exhausted holler that’s more thrilling than any fetid, hat-wearing Tom Waits wannabe dingbat they could have called in to do the honours. I’d like to think that the band’s vocals carry the implicit suggestion that the stuff this music is essentially all about (booze and women and hardship and confusion, cacophonous guitar chords and rolling thunder drums) is as relevant to our lives as it ever has been, and there’s no need to hide behind some lame Louisiana-kitsch growly persona in order to express them. But maybe I’m just thinking too hard.

So anyway! What a great recording! Fucking hell – it sounds amazing! The guitars have got far less distortion on ‘em than is usual for this kind of heavy rock, sometimes even entirely clean-toned, yet they hit home with the kind of crisp, bass-heavy WHACK that speaks of the unmistakable application of VERY HIGH VOLUME. Grr! Faux-stoner Big Muff merchants beware, this is the sound that’ll cleave you in two on day. And the interplay between the players here! Gee whiz! For all that Lords foreground the colossal macho beatdowns, there are sections throughout the record where the bassless-and-proud guitar/guitar/drums line-up throws us headfirst into fiery passages of collapse-and-rebuild jazz dynamics that just plain slay. A fair bit of this might is down to the drummer I think, and boy, what a drummer! This guy is crazy superb! Initially he grabs your attention cos sometimes he sounds a bit out of place in a heavy rock context, filling his style with so many skittering half-sure hits and weird rim-shots you wonder whether or not he knows what he’s up to… only by the time you’ve finished filing that thought, you realise he’s just taken a few seconds of guitar downtime to drop some kinda blindingly odd kick-ass break that wouldn’t embarrass that guy who drummed for Mingus! You know, the really good one. (Danny Richmond, Wikipedia tells me, though I really should know already.) And then you’ve barely got the time to reflect that some dude in a contemporary rock band just threw out a drum break worthy of a Mingus record before the riff rollercoaster roars into action again and he’s THERE, beating down like he’s in Shellac. Wow.

And hey, what do you know, track four is entitled “Mingus Pts 1-3”. Score one for my music crit skills! For as much as I’ve built this album up as revolving around MEN playing ROCK in the best possible way, there’s more sonically ambitious stuff going on here than just a peerlessly great prog-punk-blues flattening session with additional jazzisms; the album opens with the wheeze of a slowly expiring accordion, and subsequent songs take the time to temper the rock-thunder with a mournful string quartet, some renegade brass band skronk invading the aforementioned “Mingus” and a heavenly female choir entering stage left for a beautiful vocal breakdown on “The Ballad Of The Sightless And Outstretched Hands”. The liner notes even make mention of “amplified Russian dancing”, but I’d be lying if I said I could hear any, so let’s not get carried away. Point is: all this stuff fits in perfectly and organically, and never seems like a gimmick. These guys have really put some thought into their music, and pulled out the stops to make a truly stupendous record that deserves to find favour beyond the realms of earnest 20-something males who spend too long debating the merits of different brands of amplifier.

So, it seems I’ve gone on a bit, and ended up talking about drummers and other things which are perhaps not of great interest to the casual reader, for which apologies, but basically all I’m trying to make clear is; ‘This Ain’t A Hate Thing, It’s A Love Thing’ is a fucking great album, and Lords are a band whose ability to get things done well shames us all.

Mp3 > Lords – Pint Of Wine

(Buy the album from Gringo.)

(Lords website)

Labels: album reviews, Lords