Club Rock Shandy can be described as a fizzy drink, a soft drink, or a mineral. However, it doesn’t accurately fall into any of these categories, in most circles it is known as “liquid happiness”.
It really is a case of the product being equal to more than the sum of its parts, with both Club Orange and Club Lemon being far inferior drinks, and the resulting combination is surprisingly tastier.
Another example of combining bad things to create something better is listening to “One Shot” by Eminem, and “Fire in the Disco” by Electric Six at the same time. This audiophonic masterpiece is now known to have been the main source of inspiration for Radiohead when writing “Pablo Honey”.

Public Enemy are supreme artist engineers, and when we hold the black proportion of the aural architecture to the pale of the morning light that their true brilliance is revealed. High mountains and dizzying lows, the crags and cliffs they build. Acid sharp and yet sweet as bitter honey, they velvetly spit and moan through the lyrical beauty and munch munch. Social naivety is the hall mark of this record, as fool after fool moans about various nonsenses, paranoid terror and fear building within a community that utterly rejects them. Glam rock never sounded like this!

Calla grew up when there was little of any worth to eat; no fruit for vitamin C and trace elements, no milk and broccoli for calcium, no fresh meat for iron or protein. Enamel never formed on her yellowing teeth and she seemed to catch every popular contagion.

I met her in college, bundled in scarves, a Russian doll, a clasping onion skin of girl. Her mother had died the Summer before, and she resided on a scholarship, eating in the subsidised canteen on the days she could afford it, going without when she couldn’t. She rode an old fashioned bicycle, the kind with a bell and a basket, and the modest little skirts of mudflaps over thun spoked wheels.

She’d ride smiling through the high st and down the oak lined path into the college, lifting her feet from the peddles and carrying forward , letting the incline take the strain, down onto the cobbles of college square.
We’d chat on the warming evening of that first summer, tossing knot of wholemeal bread to the pigeons discussing Dylan and French poetry and our vivid adolescent dreams. One night I dreamt I was the saviour the dead, and flew unfettered in their playground, hugging their sin away like an Indian mystic. Calla had a dream she was invisible and silent, crying out to no avail, existing as a spectre in the world of men.

One evening that Autumn, after a blissful summer spent grape picking in Bordeaux, we went to one of those dreadful jocular college parties we both despised, the kind with velure jacketed aristobrats arguing loudly about Marxism over their single malt whiskeys; and strangely scented groupy chicks sharing baroque hoka’s of Moroccan hashish in dimly lit attics.

Somehow I ended up drunk on Slo-Gin and wrestling topless with the son of the Portugese ambassador. I surfaced next morning with a mouthfull of puke tendrils, eyes refusing to open fully against the onslaught of afternoon light.

I hung a sheepskin rug about my shoulders and stumbled over the evenings casualties, searching for Calla.
At first I didn’t realise it was her, her face seemed different choking on the bulk of Monty Hastings Bradley, whilst Royston Major Wilkinson took her roughly from behind. She looked oddly beautiful like that; milky freckled back arched, flaming mandarin hair recklessly cascading about her boney shoulders.

I joined the que for her mouth, and when the time came, tenderly brushed one glowing cheek as she took the length of me, her eyes sparkling with recognition. It was right then, as Elliot Fraser Darling and I high fived and thrust as one, to a chorus of ragged cheers and somewhere far below a fresh press of the Velvet underground’s ‘There She Goes Again’ hit its crechendo, that I realised. I’d met the girl I’d one day marry.

You stuffing letterbox with spit wet chunks of newspapers and glossy celebrity magazines. It’s closest come to outside in weeks and every muscle itches to get back to nest. Fingers slick and shaking, you gum steel mouth of door and away, afeared of stiff cool breeze from beneath frame.

You stumbling back up carpeted staircase, slipping on the crust shelled slicks of man muck. You paused outside the nest to rub the foul stuff from bare feet, ‘this one place must be clean’, and snork head first into warm belly of the heaving gee. Fetal, worm deep in nest to check you larv, all hot and wriggling in her pack of tight wrapped towel. With mouth chew you some colgate from a wrinked half dead tube, and pass it to it through you feed hole. Larvae moans and rolls about a bit and gather naked close to feel its warmth.

It’s one free eye is wide with love and wonder and you reach forward, plant peppermint tongue on slick cornea. Crytalis moans ‘gain, soon perhaps the hatch time, spring of all things clean and end to filthy cold and dark. A warm wet spaz, as begin to love cuddle the wriggling thing, the moaning lump that used to be you mum. Soon.

Once again i have been sadly underwhelmed by the ridiculous, indeed intrinsically ridiculous, lyrcal content, or lack there of. They gently propagand swanseaic nothings, to burlesque children of sacramental-savoyard fools. Which means nothing, not in the slightest. But you understand me. Yes you do.

The guitar chords speak of nothing, or rather suggest knowingly, whining’a'bitching nonsensical misery and essaying anally on the graphic/imperialist nature of a youngadult cross-gender relationship (this could even be extended to the whole same-gender fiscal-style relationships, or friendships, as they might whisper). Again, this doesn’t mean much either.

But more importantly, for me, the thus of this review, this album is nothing other than a repeat of a horribly staccato stencil, a spray painted graffiti of titans little valued landscapes.

Indeed this album has little of value, as an EP it is really a E-Peasant. I hope you enjoy it, because at least then it will have repaid some of the aural blood money it owes me.

That said I enjoyed their gig at Crawdaddy last month immensely.

I smelt the alcohol and smoke reek off him. It was in his hair, his clothes and his mouth. His tie was pulled down and hung like a limp noose below his neck, the top button missing from his shirt. He took of his jacket, revealing sweat stains under his arms and a spill on his belly. He coughed 3 times and sat down hard on the center of the couch. It was going to be a long night.

“Honey, I want’a beer. Grab me one, will ya’?”

I walked into the kitchen, stopping myself running and took a longneck out of the icebox. I felt the scar, a long livid streak along the hair line of my forehead. It was still blood red and tender as a mouth. I opened the bottle and poured it into a plastic mug. I hope he didn’t notice that I’d avoided giving him a bottle, a weapon. I hope he didn’t taste the rohypnol. My heart was in my mouth as I walked into the room, I splashed some beer onto the once brown now gray carpet. It imitated my hair.

“Careful there, that stuff ain’t free.” He laughed to himself, then slapped his hand onto the couch next to him. Dust rose like a firebomb. “Sit down, honey, take the weight off your corns.”

I handed him the beer and his eyes narrowed and he smiled inwards to himself. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me down onto the couch. I landed half on his lap, knocking beer over him and myself. “Goddamnit, why the hell is everyone spilling beer on me tonight?” He took a long draft and muttered something.

“I’m sorry baby”, I stammered, looking around the room, my eyes sliding over the green patterned wallpaper we said we’d replace but don’t notice anymore, and onto the scuffed door of the bathroom. It had a lock, I could hide in there. If I made it that far. Hopefully the door would hold. Hopefully the neighbors would hear my screams and call the police. Hopefully they’d come. “I didn’t mean to, you surprised me is all.”

I jumped again when his hand rested gently on my thigh, rubbing it slowly pulling up the nylon hem of my skirt. “So it was my fault? Don’t worry I’ll make it up to you.” He laughed to himself, his wheezing crap laugh that made him cough smoke in my hair 3 times. He finished his beer. There was the sound of his brass belt buckle being unfastened. “Don’t worry about it at all.”
***********************

Later, when he slept on the couch his mouth open, his trousers round his knees, I poured 3 bottles of brandy on him and on the couch. I turned on the gas and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighter in his hand. I straitened myself up as best I could and put iodine on the big carpet burn on my shin, grabbed the bag I’d packed that afternoon and left for my sisters place on 53rd street. That morning I got a call from the fire dept.

I lit 3 candles in St Mary’s of the Mercy. I loved him. My brutal bartender. My leather tongued brother.