Although best known for fronting Motor City’s pre-eminent garage-rock disco outfit, Electric Six, the strings to his creative bow are many and…well…perhaps unexpected, namely as writer and narrator of a series of pornographic thriller audio books whose creative titles came to a literary head (ooh!) with “Chinatown Reacharound!” Somehow, he has also found time to release eleven solo albums, the latest of which, Anxiety Dogs, is now out on Shortwave Records.
This is an album about love and loss, uncertainty and ultimately survival, of the lengths that people will go to merely to hold on to love. It is a suite of songs that is at turns melancholic and optimistic, upbeat and soul-searching, generically diverse, ever witty, often surreal, and always honest.
“Where’s the Love” kicks things off with a grooved up, 70’s infused, Bowie-esque slice of pop-rock, and by the time we get to “Under The Chinese Moon’s” skillful blend of anthemics and understament, we have already wandered through more sounds and styles than you thought possible.
“Hesitant Eyes” blows through the listener’s awareness on ghostly voices, a stripped back piece of finger-picked roots-pop, “One Copy Papi” reimagines grunge as a new wave pop sound, and we end with “Many Happy Returns” which is the sort of song that Nick Cave would have been happy to have had in his Birthday Party days…natch!
But, as you might expect, the music is just half the story; it is a traci-comic literary work in its own right, a strange blend of reality, parable, and poetics, often like Edward Lear meeting Charles Bukowski for tea and tequila! It’s a fever dream, and the imagination runs riot.
It’s a strange world, but a fun one to find yourself in. It takes in the wild and weird, is lovelorn and full of lunacy, and is serious and seriously off-kilter. But then, what would you expect from the man who brought the world the exquisite “Clusterfuck?”
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