Bound For Hell, But So Alive

Here’s one I wish I’d been cool enough to get into at the time, Love And Rockets, but in 1989 I just wasn’t cool enough, they weren’t rock enough. So what if they were all ex-Bauhaus members? a friend had leant me a Bauhaus cassette* and, like, whatever, who needs Bela Lugosi’s dad?

I am a big fan of the incredible Hernandez Brothers comics that the band took their name from and ironically, from memory, there is a strip where a Chicano punk band complain that some English band stole their band name Love And Rockets. Not that it ever occurred to me to check the real band out.

I can’t remember how I first heard ‘So Alive’ but I was instantly seduced by the nonchalant sexual desperation and slinky T-Rex strut of it, still am. It is still a great sounding track, the backing vox are oddly rather reminiscent of Leonard Cohen circa I’m Your Man. This song is why I bought Love And Rockets, it was cheaper than a 12″ of the single and I am very glad it was.

Let’s get the neggies out of the way before lauding the possies, Love And Rockets suffers from having a rubbish opening track (‘**** (Jungle Law)’) which sounds a bit like a US impression of Pop Will Eat Itself and one of the worst songs I can think of called ‘Rock And Roll Babylon’, which sounds like your vomit would smell like if you ate nothing but cakes and drank Sunny Delight for a year; rank.

Love And Rockets starts, for me, with the am-I-arsed? kiss off of ‘No Big Deal’. It’s kinda like Jesus & Mary Chain go pop**, all instruments electronically treated to the point they sound like approximations of instruments. The spanking on an anvil beat and the clever stops and starts are just great. It’s negative, snidey, modern, clearly made by men wearing dark glasses at night, has an awesome harmonica moment and is danceable, what more could anyone want?

‘The Purest Blue’ is a negligible but pleasant ambient interlude and then we get on the churning, heavy stomping ‘Motorcycle’. Any song crediting ‘bass feedback’ as a separate instrument is worthy of attention I think. I would argue that the motorbike referencing ‘I Feel Speed’ with its’ wistful Jane’s Addiction feel is better.

Side 2 kicks off with the best track on the whole LP, ‘Bound For Hell’. I just cannot get enough of this wee non-cowering, non-timorous beastie. This track just accelerates Love And Rockets to great heights, it’s a wonderfully mutated mutinous blues stomp, filtered through who knows what modern trickery. It’s a churning inexorable morality tale with chief tail Satan himself driving an express train to hell, packed with all manner of sinners and repentant souls. The lyrics are great, quite playful and the track gathers deadly momentum throughout its’ 6:02.

The gentle ‘Teardrop Collector’ is by contrast a swoonsome concoction featuring some gloriously simple guitar. In a masterful exhibition of the art of sequencing ‘So Alive’ just sounds perfect after it too. Love And Rockets returns to damnation and temptation with the swanky, cynical, jazzy, ‘No Words, No More’. Vibes.

---

It’s a bit of an anomaly for me Love And Rockets, I have never heard a note of anything else they did and have no real desire to either, much as I really enjoy this album. They look like a bar band from a futuristic Paul Verhoeven movie, which may be it.

Reading between the small print on the back of the LP cover every single song lists everything played by all 3 members, even though it is usually just the same instruments on each track, which is just the kind of passive/aggressive shit I would get up to if I was in a band, I reckon they weren’t getting along at the time. Indeed they took a while out after Love And Rockets was released.

Not that any of this matters, Love And Rockets is a really fun one-off LP and I rather dig the eye-bending cover art.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a train to catch.

1135 Down.

PS: Awful vid, I really hope the legs involved were the bands’ own:

*because I liked Sisters of Mercy and this was ‘proper’ goth. He was right, I was a teenage know-it-all know-nothing.

**which confusingly they had/were about to in 1989.