Wednesday 28 September 2022

Bastard Fairies - Memento Mori (2007)



Fucking Hell. I knew nothing about this lot beyond that We're All Going to Hell is a cracker, so I look them up on the web, discovering that they were briefly an internet phenomenon of some magnitude, and also that they're no more due to Yellow Thunder Woman passing away just over a year ago at the age of forty. I therefore say again, fucking hell.

We're All Going to Hell blew my knackers clean off when I first stumbled across it on One'sTube - currently at 193 thousand views and rising - and being only loosely internet savvy, it's somehow taken me nearly fifteen years to nab the album, possibly because it seemed unlikely that it could deliver on the promise of that one song; but it does. Of course, it does.

There were two of them, a bloke from England called Robin, and Yellow Thunder Woman, which was actually her name due to Native American heritage. The music reminds me a little of the Eels, or at least how the Eels should have sounded, wrapping crushingly acerbic commentary in a pill so sweet that it's dancing around with flowers in its hair - acoustic guitar, bubblegum, apple pie, pseudo-McCartneyisms, country stylings with a touch of blues, occasionally incongruous electronic touches, and what sounds like a Casio SK1 preset on the chorus of Hell, and yet lyrically it's almost X-Ray Spex at their most scathing. The Day the World Turned Bluegrass, sort of...

There's no single element which makes the whole because everything is good, and it's difficult to imagine how this combination of words and music could be improved; but special mention should probably go to Yellow Thunder Woman who sang with a voice sweet as golden sunlight and yet powerful as an industrial laser, and natural - without any of that warbling vocalisation bollocks you hear when a singer has nothing but technique; and she's brown bread, which is upsetting.

I don't know what else to say.

 


 

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