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Traditionally, sleaze-infused garage rock is the preserve of the terminally deranged. It’s a peculiarly vital sub-genre largely populated by a constituency of musicians best described as primitive; compelled to flaunt their passionately near-adequate command of their instrument because rock’n’roll’s infected their souls like a virus.
They’re known to have unruly quiffs that flop from one side of their sweat-beaded forehead to the other, they hiccup, twang ’n’ twitch their Elvine St. Vitus dance like so many possessed Jerry Lees in cheap suits, and they’re resolutely, unapologetically, wilfully not very good. But when one of these rock-soused equivalents to Appalachian snake handlers boasts something of a prodigious talent for his instrument, the sort of reliable chops that, say, might secure a position as The Pretenders’ guitarist for the past 18 years, well, magic happens.
His Lordship’s guitarist/vocalist/ frontman(iac) James Walbourne’s good. Insanely good. Brian Setzer-on-a-hotplate good. So when he applies his talents to banging out the kind of unhinged, short, sharp, shockabilly blurts, His Lordship (completed by drummer Kris Sonne, also no slouch, and another Hynde alumnus) are evidently devoted to, he presents quite the spectacle. Bored Animal continues in a similar frantic vein to the duo’s self-titled debut.
It’s fired up and furiously fashioned. Its trademark Sun-Studios-through-a-Superfuzz fidelity sounds as if it were captured on a microphone fashioned from a steel comb, a torn-up betting slip and a peanut can. Steven Wilson isn’t about to lose sleep, but this is exactly how His Lordship should sound. Like The Jim Jones Revue in a bucket. And a not particularly clean bucket at that. Musically? Try a feverishly hellbound Billy Lee Riley attempting to shout the ghost of Johnny Thunders straight. It’s that good.
Witness the dark subterranean glamour of Old Romantic, where an unhinged nocturnal protagonist can be found ‘Running from a policeman, pissing in a phone box, stealing from the milkman’. (And who, dear reader, hasn’t been there?) Characteristically bug-shit crazy lead single I Fly Planes Into Hurricanes sounds exactly as you’d expect, 12-12-21 reins things in a jot while delivering a fine line in singalong ‘woah-woah’s, before contemplative-paced closer Gin And Fog allows Walbourne to demonstrate virtuosity and restraint worthy of a Tarantino spaghetti western score.
Rock’n’roll, defined.
