Smegma: Rumblings
SMEGMA
RUMBLINGS
HANSON
Smegma’s instantly likeable, preposterously hairy junkyard clatter is puzzlingly robust and awe-inspiringly confident where much of todays slightly tepid Free-Folk shambling can sound a bit fey. But once you discover this gang of inspired Neanderthals actually started off on their cosmic trajectory in 1973, when The Godz were still together, it all starts to make sense. Smegma even played a part in the formation of The Los Angeles Free Music Society. Sealing its status as some kind of iconic document, deranged vocals are provided by none other than legendary rock hack Richard Meltzer (appearing here as Borneo Jimmy) lyricist for the Blue Oyster Cult and guiding light for D.Boon’s Minutemen.
These doyennes of liberated Rock aren’t teet-sucking post-modernists oblivious of the chemical bond between the methane of Avant-Garde sonics and their magmatic origins amid the molten rock of volcanized Folk music. “Worms”, “Moonleggs” and “Rumblings” strewn amidst the debris of clattering guitar skronk, beat poetry, squeeling woodwind and all manner of feedback actually Rock in a classical sense. These tracks recalling the messier quarters of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and even the more unhinged Neil Young as much as elsewhere the ghost of Albert Ayler.
The accompanying video squeezed on the end of the CD (technology has come on in the ten years since their last LP!) with its collage of freight trains makes plain ”Rumblings” affection for machine power, check-shirt-clad working-class unionism and the righteous hobo mythologies of the USA. This is free music at its least prosaic, so while Smegma were rapturously received by power electronics audiences on the Wolf Eyes tour (whom they supported) and Jackie O Motherfucker fans will be sure to love them, they may even deserve a broader audience.