Hyperbole is inherent in most of today’s music writing. I can imagine it sprinkled over lukewarm efforts like MSG. Every week we are promised an epoch-making-life- changing event as four white kids chug their way through the same three chords and wax lyrical about life in a northern town.
It, the hyperbole, may even have crept in to the press release for this here record.
Raymond narrates the fourth of his factory novels over a scarce and squawking gallon drunk musical score. It is said that his editor, and here comes the possible hyperbole, threw up upon finishing reading the final draft of the novel. Whether true or not, it’s a gruesome little detail that pins the final cross to the door of the damned.
There is such a sense of brooding menace form the outset of this record that it leaves you breathless. The music hums away, never intrusively, like a background wash of cars and rain. It peaks and troughs in jarring inaccuracy that cradles the words in one turn and dashes them in the next. The drop of silence mid sentence finds you straining, an ear pressed against the very doors you wished had remained closed and dead. It’s dangerous and confident and bold, eschewing the easy path in favour of structures that truly challenge whilst never alienating. And all of the paths, wasted broken and glorious paths lead to the words.
And what words, a pornography of prose, twisted and serene and delivered in a laconic almost upper class brogue. Raymond belies the brutality of his expression by chewing over his syllables like he is digesting the story, the letters accumulating on full rounded lips. It is a cadence and construct that shifts its angles to pull you in ever closer. What begins as a violent detachment, soon drags you ever closer to the dynamic. Describing in clockwork intimate detail the killing of saucer and black eyed prostitute Dora Suarez and her elderly friend, it is a postcard from the unforgiven. You are breathing hard with the killer (for it is a story of death), surveying ever creak and shadow.
It is ‘Murder Ballads’ with real intent, a ‘Black Wings’ with a lurching unstoppable darkness. And that darkness may have haunted Johnston long after the novel was closed. He said it devastated him to write it, a sliver of which can be felt in the listening. This really is life-changing stuff, but not in that good way. Not in the way of the redemption, it is the last sinner’s song and better for it.
Highly recommended.