Jon Spencer & The Hitmakers – Spencer Gets It Lit

20-05-2022

Jon Spencer (born February 5, 1965) is an American singer, composer and guitarist. He has been involved in multiple musical acts, such as Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Heavy Trash, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Jon Spencer & The Hitmakers. Jon Spencer was born on 5 February 1965 in Hanover, New Hampshire, to a university professor and a cardiology technician. He attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island where he was part of the noise rock band Shithaus, which included future Cop Shoot Cop vocalist Tod Ashley. The band was short lived and had a musical style reminiscent of the industrial music of Einstürzende Neubauten. He moved to Washington, D.C., and formed Pussy Galore, who quickly relocated to New York. He is also known for bringing attention to and popularizing the blues artist R. L. Burnside, who started touring and working with The Blues Explosion in the mid-1990s after playing and living in obscurity for three decades. In 2022, he announced the end of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and the debut of his new band, Jon Spencer & the Hitmakers, which includes Quasi's Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss. Hardly anything has been played as unpredictably, chaotic, clumsy and boned as the first Pussy Galore albums. Garage rock, but then filthy from the closed off New York neighborhoods mountain boxes which even the meanest street scum prefers to ignore. Outlaw fringe characters with Jon Spencer as the sewer rat king. And there among anarchic filthy druggy rock and roll excrement the link with that primitive blues sound is there for the taking. Staggering, looking for the destructive seamy side of existence, Jon Spencer and his wife Cristina Martinez make the switch to the equally misunderstood explosive punk Boss Hog. Cristina Martinez grows into an alternative sex symbol, and cult hero Jon Spencer makes the successful relaunch with the equally legendary Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. In the early 1990s, young guys like Albert Hammond Jr. and Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney of The Black Keys and, of course, Jack White of The White Stripes, were inspired by this unorthodox effective approach and set up their own rock bands. As the garage rock revival reaches its heyday at the turn of the century, groundbreaking Jon Spencer's interest fades. A promising new generation demands all the attention, and the old-timers who work can watch from the sidelines. In the meantime, we are already twenty years later and Jon Spencer dives into the studio with former Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert. Don't forget that these musicians share a Pussy Galore past and have known each other for years. Keyboard player Sam Coomes has a diverse session musician background, but especially together with his wife, and also Sleater-Kinney percussionist Janet Weiss, makes name recognition as the indie rock duo Quasi. With Mike Gard aka M. SORD behind the drums, Jon Spencer & The Hitmakers is a fact. Anyway, the Big Fish within this group remains the experienced Jon Spencer, who again leaves his musical signature in bold and whose name graces the album cover, looking maliciously into the camera as a reborn vampire. The cunning tom with the nine lives played out. Eccentric, cross and versatile. Still an impressive personality, his years of lived destructiveness is clearly visible in the grooves on his face, and he is still responsible for the sickest guitar chords. Plug in, clear your mind and play. 'Junk Man', bad female B-movies horror screams, dusty church organ drama, heavily psychedelic drug swamps and slick catchy dance rhythms. How do you smear two and a half minutes of filth in an album track, Jon Spencer does it again. And then I haven't even mentioned the surprisingly strong vocal qualities. And what about the cursing spacing effects, the American Dream dreaminess at the end of the track and those striking Californication Hollywood Hill lyrics? Shit, forgot too! Yes, because that's what it's all about in the end, decades of continuous decay and addictive stimulants offense. Plain language, I know, but it's so old-fashioned overwhelming that the genuine enthusiasm pushes rational thinking into the background. A biased master kick-off or an otherwise untrue false start? Definitely not the latter! Enjoy The Silence ? No, come on! Then strike hard with Batmobile speed. 'Get It Right Now', right now! Raking and chopping deafeningly, Mike Gard works his way through speeding disaster train cars to roaring psychobilly guitar violence. The fact that the energy price is soaring is not noticeable here, oiled fat and the foursome thunder through at full course speed. 'Death Ray' would lend itself perfectly to the soundtrack of a wrought-up Playstation speed game. Cyberpunks? Just kidding, this is the real deal. Personal Jesus guitar riffs with John Spencer as the demonic supreme god. Desert rock, burnt-out blisters on the hands, overheated and thirsty. Shall we have a dance? Fine, but with the hired female beauty in the back room of the emergency exit eliminated Hotel California. 'The Hills Have Eyes' and those bloodthirsty creatures lurking around eagerly. The narrative 'The Worst Facts' evokes those other tormentors. The worst of humanity takes center stage, the devil sells his soul to Jon Spencer and receives a ticket to this hellish party as a gift. The repulsive 'Primary Baby' goes against all the rules. Fuck the whole feminist thing. References to straightforward sex, lusty vulgar sex objects and the primal animal instinct. For bad women who fall for wrong men and are at peace with that. Burnt-out burnt-out reality frenzy in the sickening 'Strike 3'. The light-footed funken comic 'Worm Town' claims the dark underground life. Hard-working debris-clearing creatures, who indulge in far-reaching remains and maintain the flora and fauna. Nothing sinister about it, just a natural process. Frank Zappa like 'Does Humor Belong in Music?' crap. Devo absurdism and boogie woogie piano keys in 'Get Up & Do It', and why not? Bruise, on the other hand, has wonderful manic noise rock excesses, Pixie's madness and a bit of Bob Bert Sonic Youth legacy. Crooning contrary, 'Layabout Trap' takes on the contemporary jazzy post-punk challenge. Jon Spencer may have the newly awakened Count Dracula look, but he really isn't living under a rock. A little flirting with the contemporary music scene in 2022, it's all part of it. The eerily cinematic 'Push Comes to Shove' musically digs even deeper into the destructive artist's past, and forms the red Spencer "Gets Lit" thread. The Peg Entwistle Hollywood Sign jump to death in 1932, the mystical self-defeating 27 club lifestyle, New York's The Factory 15 Minutes of Fame Andy Warhol ideology in the glam rock feat of 'My Hit Parade' and the feverish capitalist 'Rotting Money' label bosses kickbacks. Consciously or unconsciously ? Jon Spencer will not worry about it, he has observed the star world and lived in the middle of Cockaigne himself. "Spencer Gets Lit" is a tad darker than his earlier work. A masterpiece ? Well, no, Jon Spencer isn't in on that. That's not true rock and roll attitude at all, is it? It's important to say, it should be fun. And that April 1 release date is perhaps the biggest joke yet. Before there was Jack White, there was Jon Spencer, the original underground white boy rock'n'roll freak force with jet-black hair and an encyclopedic knowledge of the blues. In 1991, after playing in Pussy Galore, he formed The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion with Judah Bauer, Russell Simins and a theremin. The band blasted a scuzzed-out amalgam of garage rock, punk, blues, R&B and occasionally hip-hop, with no bass guitar, unwitting progenitors to the garage revival of the new millennium and bass-free acts like the White Stripes and The Black Keys. Spencer has always followed his offbeat instincts, seemingly allergic to the requirements of a commercial crossover. His particular aesthetic, monster-movie camp meets a record collector's studiousness and a charismatic preacher's howls, has endeared him to a host of likeminded but more famous oddballs, everyone from the late Anthony Bourdain to the director Edgar Wright. But it has also placed him firmly in the margins, in spite of a few hits like "Bellbottoms" (used in Wright's film "Baby Driver") and funk burner "Calvin" from 1998's Acme. Instead of moving zillions of units, he built his reputation as a live act, one of the most wild and magnetic to ever launch from New York's sonic underbelly. Since the '80s, Spencer has been an unwavering force on the Downtown scene, a living antidote to the myth that underground rock in New York was dead near the turn of the century. It couldn't have been, because Spencer has always been very much alive. With him, there's never been a lengthy hiatus or calculated retirement and then comeback. So it's no surprise that his latest feels like the natural extension of a decades-long arc, ringing of Spencer's singular aesthetic with subtle updates to the template. It grooves, but it doesn't jam. It's junked out, but never trashy (Pussy Galore alum Bob Bert in fact plays a collection of trash cans and scrap metal). It's moody and strange, but never unlistenable. Spencer is a showman, after all, a sonic witchdoctor who'll blow your mind but not make you work too hard for it. The album trades the theremin for Sam Coomes' Farfisa organ and other buzzing synths, and the singer's signature "bluuuuuues exploooosion" interjection for an amped-up, often terrified, narrator. "You talk about gold/But you're selling trash/You're just a junk man", he insists on the album's opening track, an indictment that applies to any number of modern leaders oblivious to everything but personal gain. In "The Worst Facts", Spencer takes stock of his own mortality as an aged rocker in a future time: "People don't play that way anymore!" he blurts over a twisted drone. "Worm Town", the album's sixth track, finds Spencer's character in a "...big dirt nap, six feet deep". Though the album's lyrics are often sobering, its music, with its deep groove and pulsating fuzz, is notably energising, a duality that offers just the right amount of weight. It also relays a palpable sense of urgency, the feeling that even if the world is ending, we should have fun on our way out. For a man who finds his mojo onstage, two years of lockdown was particularly deadening, which makes the liberating effects of this music that much more palpable, its wild freakbeat a freeing force. "There are songs to sing, noises to make, places to go, y'know, got a lot of living to do!" Spencer says. The aleatoric energy running through the record also aids its revitalising quality, teetering on the precipice of unhinged without outright toppling over. Throughout, there is the sense that the performances were recorded in those fleeting moments when a new song tips from chaos to cohesion. It also portends the truly enticing promise of a new Spencer release: the live show. And this time around, it promises Sleater-Kinney alumnus Janet Weiss behind the drum kit, joining her Quasi partner Coomes. "Spencer Gets It Lit" is the strongest recorded offering from the rocker since the Blues Explosion's 2012 album, "Meat + Bone". But outside of its individual merits, it fulfills another need in a society prone to homogeneity via viral trends and fast fashion : a world with Jon Spencer in it.

1. Junk Man 02:21

2. Get It Right Now 02:24

3. Death Ray 03:54

4. The Worst Facts 03:08

5. Primary Baby 02:23

6. Worm Town 03:34

7. Bruise 02:26

8. Layabout Track 02:50

9. Push Comes To Shove 01:58

10. My Hit Parade 02:26

11. Rotting Money 02:44

12. Strike 3 02:14