One Guyrection

IF YOU THINK YOUR LIFE MEANS ANYTHING
YOU’RE JUST PLAIN FUCKING WRONG
NOTHING! NOTHING!
NOTHING FOREVER MORE!
THERE IS NO MEANING
THAT’S THE POINT
THERE IS NO POINT AT ALL

Ever felt the joy of being completely crushed flat? helplessly letting go and surrendering to superior force? I don’t want to come on like a bargain basement Robert Crumb here, but hey, it’s a riot.  Just treat yourselves to a well-deserved copy of Bad Guys Bad Guynaecology and experience the joy for yourselves.

I first wrote about this beast of an album the day I got it hot off the press back in June this year and there’s always a danger when something flashes into your consciousness like that it won’t last the course, but I’m very happy to report that Bad Guynaecology is still going strong, I keep listening and I keep hearing new things – my favourite track keeps changing and that’s got to be a good thing.

A truly great writer once described Bad Guynaecology thus,

a righteous mix of hardcore-informed metal and a slightly unhealthy tinge of backwoods strangeism – you know those drooling hick cannibal moonshine-addicted murdering types you get in US horror movies? well they learned instruments.

Who am I to disagree?  but repeated listens reveal a lot more craft going on too.  I was lured down to the Bad Guys’ basement by the real obvious opening twosome, ‘Crime’ and ‘Prostitutes’, both brilliant, hard rocking and, crucially for me, funny tracks but it’s the longer doomier, heavier numbers that have kept me locked in down there.  Let me explain.

Warm up your neck muscles first, remove all fragile objects, family members and family pets from your listening room and cue up the mighty ‘No Tomorrow’ the 11-minute closing track on Bad Guynaecology.  The big drum-heavy intro recalls doom merchants like High On Fire et al. without ever copying any of them and by the time the track fires into even more life I just have no resistance left at all.  ‘No Tomorrow’ just builds and builds, rejecting any easy summits and clichés, by the time the pay off comes you’re just CRUSHED.  It sounds like a world being taken apart, levelled and rebuilt.  Anyway who can resist a track that sounds like someone just broke up with Satan?

No sleep in darkness
A heart in despair
Scattered in ashes
run skeletal fingers through your hair
Suffer in sadness
Hell won’t forfend
There’s no tomorrow
This is the end

Fear Hate Honour Death Seduction Love Pride Sex Lies

Surely I don’t need to tell you how many 1537 bonus points Bad Guys score for using the word ‘forfend’ in a track?  But, I have a real soft spot for the rural Motörhead sound they nail on ‘Reaper’, although I’m struggling to pinpoint exactly when Lemmy last wrote a lyric mentioning Tectonic plates? maybe on a B-side sometime around Bomber? the lyrics are in capitals on their website and rightly so:

UNDERNEATH THE SURFACE OF YOUR LIFE
TECTONIC PLATES OF MISERY AND STRIFE
NIGHTMARE ABSURDITY WILL GRIND UP YOUR BONES

Look, it’s all brilliant – trust me. Take ‘Zoltan’ with its hyper riffing and vocals executed in the style of a really pissed off Tuvan throat singer, sample lyric ‘Venom and leather / The sound of a good fight / You snakes are fucked’.  Or take ‘World Murderer’ an everyday tale of interplanetary space doom and conquest.

Add all this wondrous heaviness together and you have a really great LP, the playing is just excellent throughout as is the production by James Gomez Arellano, the guitar sound is particularly great.  If Bad Guys wanted to play it straight as one of yer run-of-the-mill doom rock outfits they have the chops to do so, easily.  But to my mind Bad Guys are WAY more interesting than that, they’re real, they’re funny – hell, Bad Guynaecology could have been custom-built to appeal to me.

In any just, true and righteous society Bad Guynaecology would immediately become a cultural cornerstone of our very civilization – the band would all be knighted at once and given huge country estates in which to desport themselves as they will, visitors to London would be greeted by 50′ tall bronze statues of them, they would have their own prime time Saturday night TV show and our currency would immediately be renamed ‘Baddies’ in their honour.

That none of this has happened yet is a dire judgment upon us as a nation.

595 Down

PS: Stuart from Bad Guys was recently kind enough to answer a few witless questions from me:

Is the song ‘Crime’ autobiographical? or did you just make the whole thing up to rhyme with a bad word?

It’s made up. I told my dad about it recently and he said I had a Tonka truck, so I dunno why I made up this weird story about stealing one.

Have ladies of purchasable virtue ever committed carnal acts in your garden?

Yes. It’s annoying.

Good excuse for the quite brilliant video for that track right here:

Who is Zoltan?

Dr. Zoltan Takacs is a snake hunter. He travels the world capturing snakes and studying their venom, looking for something that will help save mankind.

Sword, axe or mace?

Peace, love and understanding.

What skills do you have that would help you survive a zombie apocalypse?

I’ve got a bike.

Good excuse for a semi-transport related brilliant video from Bad Guys, their first LP:

When are you going to release a huge 70’s-style rock Christmas single? and what are you going to call it?

It’ll be called Holly and the I.V. About a girl called Holly who’s in a coma and hooked up to an intravenous drip, on Christmas day.

What’s the most starstruck you’ve ever been meeting someone?

I met Woody Allen once. Didn’t really get starstruck, I just didn’t say much that’s all.  He played air clarinet the whole time.

What’s next / coming up soon for Bad Guys? 

I expect we’ll write some more music, record it, release it and tour it about. It’s almost crushingly inevitable.

And as I always say you can’t beat a good bit of crushing inevitability, or come to that, inevitable crushing.  Buy this LP, go see them – we need Bad Guys in our lives.