Review Summary: I was born on a dirt road..
Namesaked after the Southern Gothic gutter author, the short-lived grinding squelch of Harry Crews was a churlish, ill-bred alliance of Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch (along with Sadie Mae, who’d figured in a slew of 80’s underground bands in one capacity or another). By 1989, Lunch had already cemented her status as the addled matriarch of avant-garde grime, and was now swaying between dozens of side projects with frantic frequency. Gordon was just a year off after
Daydream Nation had captured everything. It seems only natural then that she took some time from that newly-crystallized sound and dove back into reverberant, lo-fi filth.
Naked in Garden Hills was snatched during two live shows in Vienna and London, a bag of scraps that runs the length of noise rock, through motorik drags and thrash relays. But the sonic heart of the LP lies with no-wave as it exited its low-key 80’s genesis and stepped drunkenly into the full-bodied 90’s.
Crews, the notoriously loudmouthed, raucous writer, figures just about everywhere here, with Gordon and Lunch reciting passages from his essays, and naming most every song after his work. Lunch and Gordon being who they are, coupled with the record being strung out of two live shows, there’s little cohesion on offer here. They pull a switcheroo, covering each other’s early staples (Lunch taking on “She’s in a Bad Mood” and Gordon coarsely shouting her way through Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ “Orphans”), abruptly stop songs to recite Crews snapshots, and generally sound like they’re playing for themselves than for the crowd. None of it does much to impede the sinister energy coursing through the shows, and even in the face of all that detachment, some relatively button-down highlights push their way through the loose mess. “Gospel Singer” is beautifully dismal death march, sharing a name with Crews’ first novel. “Knockout Artist,” the writer’s tribute to a talented young boxer’s descent into vice and loss, gets the Gordon treatment. She stirs the tune with a typically unhinged hand, wild throaty yelps on the verses and laying into the bass so hard it sounds like the guitar body is splintering. Not to be outdone by her marquee band-mates, Mae packs strange adroit fills just about everywhere, shining through on “Bring Me Down” in particular. Another stellar cut, the frenetic “Car” lands someplace between garage and early crust, Lunch and Gordon chanting out the hook in unison. It all gets capped-off somewhere towards the end by the 9-minute squall of “S.O.S.” (Sh
it on a Shingle), Lunch and Gordon barking and howling over a rumbling noise track, before Lunch announces that they had come to give the audience ‘something they couldn’t get at home,’ and then proceeds to do a paraphrased boil-down of Crews’ long-running theme of a man being strung up and murdered by his own banal desires.
No part of Harry Crews is required listening for either Sonic Youth fans, or even Lunch completists. What it is, is three women roiling in the thick of their creative peaks, that dizzying distance oft-unreachable, when even the throw-offs, the toss-aways and f
uck-arounds come packed with enough inventive kinks to keep you coming back again and again.
