Right. Let’s get this this thing back on track, with some words on my favourite LP of the year thus far (ok, so it was released late 2012, but I doubt many copies crossed the pond prior to the new year, so let’s not split hairs).

I’ve long been meaning to find the time / words / impetus to write a big overview on Cheater Slicks, a band whose work has crept up on me slowly over the past few years, making a bit of a dent in my heart & soul in the process.

Never the “FIRST LISTEN = AWESOME” proposition their ‘90s record companies may have wished for, Cheater Slicks is more the kind of thing you need to let sink in gradually. Impatient listeners, hitting up early albums like ‘Destination Lonely’ (’92) or ‘Don’t Like You (’95), may have written them off as just a competent garage-punk band, lurking somewhere between Mudhoney and Jon Spencer, and moved on. But keep listening, delve deeper, plough forward through the discography, and one grey day when your spirits hit the same Venn diagram as theirs, you’ll get it.

Having doggedly stuck it out for decades in the face of general critical and audience indifference, the group’s siege mentality has (in purely musical terms at least) done them a world of good, allowing them to hone their craft and bolster their defenses with a general spirit of non-damn-giving that seems to make their output stronger and more immovable as time goes on, to the extent that ‘..Grape’ strikes me as about the best record they’ve ever made (well, best one I've HEARD anyway - still some gaps to cover in my collection).

What they do is blues essentially – not in form, but in feeling; the blues of a frustrated, unremarkable middle-aged man, stuck in the rain in some shithole city. It’s a tough gig, but it’s an honest one, and Cheater Slicks have been covering their chosen beat for so long, they can pull you along for the ride with a rare mixture of monolithic brute force and great subtlety that makes for truly affecting rock music.

Since I’ve evoked the “frustrated ugly man” demographic, let us please stress that Cheater Slicks are coming at it from a rather different angle, and those understandably wary of such conjurations should not be unduly put off. Not for them the belligerent, self-conscious machismo of a group like Pissed Jeans, nor the try-hard hurdy-gurdying of your nearest plague of Birthday Party disciples. In fact, even to mention this stuff in the same breath as our heroes seems a horribly crass misstep, just as a few spins of ‘Reality is a Grape’ tends to make any music betraying even the slightest hint of artifice sound like a bad joke in comparison. But we’ve got to clear the air.

So let’s start again. Dana Hatch’s usually rather strident drumming takes a back seat on ‘..Grape’, perhaps a reflection of the long-term health problems that put the band on hold for a few years prior to this album (a circumstance that also perhaps contributes to the hefty emotional whack these songs carry). Whilst he keeps time though, Tom & David Shannon’s guitars achieve what I think veteran rock/noise listeners should be able to recognise as singular heights of unlikely beauty. Long-time dons of low key / non-showy axe magic, these guys have a better understanding of what makes an electric guitar ring true and hit the right synapses than, well… you or I, for a start. Straight out of the gate, this is one of the heaviest Slicks records I’ve heard to date. The familiar Velvets/Crazy Horse strum-drifts and cracked tremolo leads of their best late ‘90s work, though still present amid the foundations, are swiftly overtaken by an arms race of successive pedal-drops, building up a palette of tummy-rumbling low-end, nasty thug/trash low-mid compression and ear damaging treble that creates a mighty wall of knotty speaker-blare, occasionally even pushing toward Les Rallizes Denudes levels of full-spectrum blow-out.

Within this racket though, thought and tenderness is ever in evidence. What these guys are working with here is over two decades of musical interplay, twenty-something years of learning to express themselves through the means of heavily processed strings and wood, of learning to carry us with them rather than simply assaulting us, of channeling all excess back into the song.

It may seem odd to wax so lyrical about lumbering temper tantrums like ‘Love Ordeal’ and ‘Psychic Toll’, but just listen to those riffs hammer down and point me toward a new band who can bring guts like this to the party, who can wring the neck of good taste with quite so much impassioned discontent. And moving on from everyday frustrations, there is at points a nigh-on apocalyptic feel going on here too, with Hatch and Tom S. bellowing through ‘Jesus Christ’ and, uh, ‘Apocalypse’ like grizzled sergeants calling their men to safety under heavy fire, polluted rivers parting as the band attain a kind of urban white man’s gospel.

And standing dead centre toward the end of side one, ‘Hold On to Your Soul’, where all this comes together, the kind of track it’s difficult to even consider approaching with words. Let’s just say that when things are looking black in the near future, when I’m walking to some supermarket in the dark wondering if I can be bothered to put one foot in front of the other, I know what I’ll be reaching for on my mp3 player. If I hear any piece of music this year that better reminds me of the reasons why I became so fixated on the strange magic of men manipulating guitars and speaker cabinets in the first place, that better reaffirms for me of the reasons why I should still make the effort, I’ll be very surprised.

In short: Cheater Slicks exposes fake-ass bullshit in seconds. If you are a person who likes rock music, and if you find yourself somewhat alienated by the state much of it has been reduced to since the turn of the century, be bold and grab the affirming flames where you can.

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Buy the LP (in the USA) from Columbus Discount here.

Get the mp3s from UK Amazon (like I did) here.

Visit Cheater Slicks on Tumblr here.

Labels: album reviews, Cheater Slicks