It's rare that I get an album first time I hear it, and usually it takes three or four plays to make sense, often more. I'm still trying to connect with that final Shellac album, for example. Wrong Blues however is one of those rare exceptions, sounding reasonably incredible the very first time it travelled up the old school wires and into my brain. I'm not even sure exactly why. The sound is minimal and arguably rough as fuck with mains hum, hiss, and mild distortion contributing to the ambience as much as any of the instruments - if they are instruments. Some tracks are just a voice, but here and there we get what might be a guitar or might just as easily be broken strings stretched across an old tin bath, and there's a kick drum which sounds like a hobnail boot against a box of rusty tools. There are electronics of the screwdriver in the radio variety and sparing use of rudimentary effects, in case anyone is worried, but mostly it could have been recorded - possibly on a mono portable tape recorder with a condenser mic - at more or less any point since 1960. None of this is an affectation, so far as I can tell. It's why the music works, and I'm reminded of Billy Childish insisting that all you really need is a microphone plugged into something that records sound, and if what you're doing is any good, then you'll need nothing more.
With such a basic sound, the emotive force here is carried by the voice, no stranger to booze, ciggies or grinding hardship I would guess, with even incidental half-heard sounds of metal objects rattling around delivering the soul punch you'd expect of a well rehearsed horn section. It's the sound of those old blues musicians before anyone coaxed them into fancy studios, and - at the other extreme - if you can handle Einstürzende Neubauten or SPK back when they were an atrocious fucking noise, Wrong Blues doesn't sound like either, but the mood is of equivalent density and you'll probably enjoy this too. Should anyone have forgotten, the blues isn't pharmaceutical television advertising featuring smiling eldsters jamming in the park, it's what comes out when life hits you right in the fucking face over and over and over, and it's captured right here should any bright young things need a reminder.
My personal favourites are Toxic Blues, Hope in Hell, Hello My Little Maniac and Flask Blues, most of which benefit from a supporting din that stands in for whatever more traditional sound you might have anticipated, but Wrong Blues really needs to be heard in its entirety for the full benefit, not least for the red raw vocal litany. This is what music sounded like before it was repackaged and sold back to us as product.
Outstanding.
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