Blues Explosion - Damage

Genre rock Publisher Sanctuary Records External Links Blues Explosion Sanctuary Records

I've always liked avant-blues--records like Captain Beefheart's Strictly Personal and James Blood Ulmer's Black Rock and Memphis Blood. I also like straight blues itself, everything from Texas Alexander and Skip James to Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson. The post-hill-country blues found on the Fat Possum label is more like frat-boy whomp aestheticized for an audience suspicious of the Chicago blues which Aykroyd and Belushi did nothing to further, despite the interesting car-chase scenes and cameos in The Blues Brothers. But I like soul music and R & B even better--more overtly commercial, usually sexier, better to dance to. I'd rather eat Aretha's cooking than Elmore James's, even though both will make you fat.

Of course, anyone who has thought about it knows that "blues" is a rather elastic term, one that can refer to a style of playing and singing as well as to a more general way of organizing music. And it can refer to a sensibility. It's safe to say that blues has permeated American music to the point that worrying about the genre itself--what it is, what it isn't--is an exercise in futility. The Fat Possum guys have it half-right--blues music doesn't mean just Muddy Waters or Wolf or John Hurt (whose repertoire was derived from that of white performers and who played guitar in a decidedly non-"blues" style and probably didn't consider himself a blues singer to begin with). Al Green did blues, and so did the early Sun Records performers, even though they might not have known or cared. But the Fat Possum people have got it wrong in a major way too--they worship primitivism to the exclusion of everything else. Primitivism works fine on a Saturday night in Mississippi, maybe--especially if you're a tourist who doesn't know any better--but it can produce pretty lousy recorded documents. Even when you add, you know, newfangled technology and then act like you've got it both ways, ancient and modern.

All of which is probably more interesting than the record under review, the Blues Explosion's Damage, which is an example of something akin to "blues" but which is really more like a rather archaic hard-rock record of the late '60s and early '70s with the addition of newfangled technology. Jon Spencer has a caricature blues voice, which is the point, but it makes for uncomfortable listening as he does the soul-revue "get on up, it's so good to play for y'all" shtick at every opportunity. The songs are basic riff-based things--"Burn It Off" is pretty good and "Help These Blues" is some kind of program music related to blues, with a bridge of sorts--and while everyone pitches in, these songs are at least as boring as anything by Free or Canned Heat. In fact, Canned Heat might have been better. They try to get topical on "Hot Gossip"--I hear lyrics like "there's a war goin' on" and "talk about safety, freedom, democracy"--and Chuck D. guests on this to no discernible effect. "Rattling" is kind of like Sun rockabilly backwards or something, avant-slapback. DJ Shadow adds little to "Fed Up and Low Down." They do get a nice nasty groove going on occasion and the guitar-playing and drumming is good. Decent enough party record--bring on the barbecued bologna and barbecue spaghetti (try it--it's not al dente but it's tasty), the saltine crackers and the Prairie Belt canned sausages (the latter available cheap at many Memphis-area grocery stores, in case you're wondering).