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Review: 'LUNCH, LYDIA & CYPRESS GROVE'
'A Fistful Of Desert Blues'   

-  Label: 'Rustblade Label'
-  Genre: 'Blues' -  Release Date: '30th May 2014'-  Catalogue No: 'RBL045'

Our Rating:
Having been a big fan of Lydia Lunch since first seeing her live in 1986 and a collector of her prodigious output ever since ,it was a great pleasure to be sent a review copy of her second album for Rustblade. And, as with last year's Taste Our Voodoo it's a collaboration with another artist, on Taste Our Voodoo it was Phillippe Petit and on this album it is Cypress Grove.

Also like its successor, A Fistful Of Desert Blues is available in a variety of formats including a deluxe edition that comes in a wooden box with a DVD and other extras or Vinyl or a normal CD. Where does this album fit into Lydia's canon, then? Well in sound it's somewhere between Transmutations and Champagne, Cocaine & Nicotine Stains: the album she recorded with Anubian Nights a few years ago.

This album is an extension of the collaboration Lydia and Cypress made on the Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions project, expanding the slow blues grooves into dark, twisted songs. It features a mix of originals and a couple of well-chosen covers and yet the songs could have been written at any time in the last century or so.

Sandpit sets the tone; slow and carefully picked blues guitar like Paco De Lucia full of Spanish cadences with Lydia's smoky, slow vocals imploring us to try to get out of the sandpit.

When You're Better is a slow rumination that could be about coming back after you've kicked your bad habits and if you're back to your old self again. Lydia's vocals are double tracked in places for extra effect.

Devil Winds sounds like the winds are howling through the studio as Lydia sings a sad tale of fending off the attacks of her partner as they argue and fight and the relationship falls apart; her voice sounding sad and broken as Cypress picks out his slow down home blues.

Revolver is not a Beatles-esque affair, but a Mark Lanegan cover that sounds like it should be the soundtrack to an old school Sergio Leone western shoot-out, even as the lyrics make clear the revolver is her lover not a gun. Yet the bass drum is hit almost like a rat-a-tat gunfire: haunting and slightly scary as are Lydia's vocals as she harmonises with herself.

The guitar at the start of Beautiful Liar almost sounds classical rather than blues-y as Lydia intones about her partner losing control in the battle of sex as the music becomes scarier and the images darker still.

I'll Be Damned continues Lydia's normal dark themes and tales of love gone wrong again. It's nice and slow and thoughtful as she decides if she should do to you what you deserve. Well it's not as dark as Daddy Dearest was but it still sounds like it's coming from a deliciously scary place but with evocative music that can't fail to draw the listener in.

No surprise that there's a Jeffrey Lee Pierce song on the album. They play St Mark's Place and the way Lydia sings of watching you walking down St Marks Place makes it sound like she is almost a police Surveillance officer waiting to make a drugs bust as much as a Junkie waiting for the dealer to show up with the deal. Will her character escape or stay locked in the cycle of despair?

Jericho is the most overtly political piece on the album and sounds like it could almost be about the Middle Eastern problems and the never-ending cycle of violence in the Gaza as much as anything else. As all roads lead to Jericho, will those walls come tumbling down? We'll probably never know but the slow restrained blues sound almost like JJ Cale attempting to re-write Ghostriders in the Sky in the style that Concrete Blonde did on Mojave but turning it into something new entirely.

Tuscaloosa is a classic poker-playing gambling tune. Let's just say I wouldn't try cheating on Lydia or the gambling man she lives with. The song has a real dustbowl blues feel to it; nice and down and dirty and beautifully played like a perfect bluff with a low pair or else a lost Bob Frank song.

Lydia's Summer Of My Disconnect is an effortless break up song of disconnecting from a lover rather than from the digital world we now connect to. She wipes away her tears and gets on with her life again and it contains some very wild Spanish guitar playing as she disconnects.

End Of My Rope sees Lydia almost having a duet with herself as the backing singer as they swear they are not going back home and are moving on from that lover back home and hoping not to end up on the end of that rope while some frantic guitar comes in while they flee to a better place. It's also the most likely tune on the album to get you up and dancing.

TB Sheets closes the album and no, it's not the John Lee Hooker/ Van Morrison tune but is every bit as dark and blue as that magnificent song.As the harmonica trades licks with the guitar and Lydia tells us to look into her eyes, wow, she's not wearing shades!! She begs and pleads with us to let her breathe as she can almost smell our TB Sheets, which is a scary thought as she is almost having an argument over this careful blues. It is almost like a more mature re-imagining of her meltdown Oratorio: a fitting end to a very cool modern blues album.

You can choose which version to get at Rustblade Records online. I'd also recommend this as a good way to get into Lydia as it is far more accessible than some of her albums, both sonically and lyrically.
  author: simonovitch

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LUNCH, LYDIA & CYPRESS GROVE - A Fistful Of Desert Blues