Anyone up for a yabbering, slavering hunk of obnoxious sped up Norwegian hard rock (and roll)? Quick then, all aboard the good ship Gluecifer – Captain Poon, the bridge is yours:
I got a car full of stash And I want to sell it
Got some tickets and hash And now I want to sell it
Oh yes, yes, yes! Welcome to Gluecifer Automatic Thrill, the band’s 2004 swan song and my favourite LP of theirs. From the late 90’s onwards so much great rock music seemed to pour out of Norway and Sweden; I loved the Hives, Backyard Babies, the Glorious Bankrobbers, Turbonegro, the Hellacopters but most of all Gluecifer. There was just something fresh and unjaded about the whole scene to my tired old ears anyway – a thrillingly fresh injection of maximum rock ‘n roll.
I got some shit on a boat And I want to move it
A crate of guns and a goat And I want to move it*
Gluecifer’s lineage runs somewhere through the MC5, Hanoi Rocks, the Stones and the Damned, which will do me fine coming down heavy in the rock, rather than metal, trench. I remember the first time I heard ‘Shaking So Bad’, I just flipped out and started spasming in pure joy – how could anything this cool have existed in the world without my knowing it before? it sounded like everything I liked in rock without sounding like anyone else much at all. Yowza!
Gluecifer go heavy on the accelerator and aggro for every track on Automatic Thrill like it might be the last they would ever get to play on, I love that – no room for slackers in this unit. Examples? try ‘Here Come The Pigs’ for size and yes, it is about being busted and beaten up by the man**. That bass line does things to me that I normally have to pay for. True story. To make everything even better, closing track ‘The Good Times Used To Kill Me’ has a long talkie intro, Biff Malibu doing his best Iggy Pøp impression, narrating the casual carnage of a night out amongst the lowlifes in Oslo^.
There’s not a lot else to write here, other than to simply restate that Automatic Thrill is a damn cool ride, sculpted by men who wear leather and sunglasses after dark. It isn’t an overly simplistic treat either I play this LP a lot and I find that I keep being rewarded with new things in it, a phrase I missed here, a little harmony there. But let us not pretend this is a latter-day Radiohead LP, this is just a darned good time and as chroniclers of sickening excess they have few peers, ‘I got a speedfoot tapping on the bathroom tile / I got a rabbit heart and a mouthful of bile’. Indeed.
So just lie back on deck baby and let Captain Poon, Biff Malibu and Raldo Useless^* engage the forward thrusters and take you on a salacious safari ride to Thrilldania.
863 Down.
*a crate of guns and a goat?! Man, that’s going to make for one depraved and wondrous weekend. Just please fellas, I don’t want to see the photos.
**as a wild-eyed outlaw, scraping a maverick existence in the criminal demimonde myself I can really relate to this. I probably wouldn’t be able to if I was just some legal jerk who worked in an office, or something.
^not too many other songs in the 1537 feature someone shouting ‘take a dump in my head!‘ over and over again.
^*I’m ignoring Danny Young here, great drummer he may be but his name isn’t quite RAWWK enough. My friend Ste and I used to play a game at work where we’d come up with glam rock names for ourselves – Dizzy Banger and Screech Benson (on drums and vox respectively) were our favourites.