Earl Brutus
Tonight You Are The Special One

"Carrying the weight of remorse within, that's what scares people" (Clint Eastwood "High Plains Drifter", 1971)

When I listen to this album, I can't help but wonder if Nick Sanderson ever regretted having contributed to the descent into hell of Jeffrey Lee Pierce. You see, I care too much for JLP, whom I consider the embodiment of the '80s loser, almost forgotten as an interpreter of the cursed figure in disgrace, with a heart heavily tested by love disappointments and abuses of drugs and alcohol. Nick was the drummer for the icy Clock DVA when he joined the passionate Gun Club. And with them, he learned to love, taking away Romi, Jeffrey's Japanese girlfriend, leaving behind an empty man who, in his pain, perished just two years later.

In that cursed 1996, Sanderson, having risen to the quality of frontman, released the first album by Earl Brutus, the new group formed together with former WOT members Gordon King and James Fry (Martin of ABC's brother). Given the origin of the characters and their connections (like Pulp), they were categorized in the popular Britpop stream, and such "labeling" stuck even for their second album in 1998, this extraordinary modern-day glam kaleidoscope called "Tonight You Are The Special One".

Britpop?!? But do you think someone who has explored fractal rhythms under the employ of the seven-note hacker Adi Newton and then ridden the sacred fury of punk blues with JLP could ever make music like any Gallagher brother? Take for example "Edelweiss", the first thing that comes to mind is Kraftwerk with that android singing filtered through the vocoder, the guitars damnably heavy with rhythms instead hitting on the danceable. What genre do they play? They are capable of mixing ragged rock with Kraut electronics, glam, baroque pop, dark, progressive, and rave all in one cauldron. Maybe to some, it might seem like a hodgepodge of genres without a guiding path, a weather vane at the mercy of incoherent musical bursts, the inability to be normal.  I put on a random track: "Your Majesty We Are Here " starts with heavily prog keyboards but soon after they dive into the fray, hand-to-hand, with the cry of that yeyeyeyeyeah that consumes the pills, chills, and stomachaches of all the clubs in Manchester.

 The album opened with the apocalyptic rhythms of "The SAS and the Glam That Goes With It", capable of mixing the Tubes' cheeky irony with the ferocity of the Fall in one go, an anthem with a contagious riff that is worth the ticket price (and as a bonus, they even give you a robotic tail à la Ralf und Florian!) They don't give you time to breathe and with "Universal Plan" they place another heavy glam rock gem, tribal drums, and Nick's wild singing in the footsteps of guru Mark Stewart. But what truly moved me to tears is "Midland Red", an ethereal psychedelic ballad à la Flaming Lips, traversed lengthwise and crosswise by space rock synth tracers, that suddenly springs into the atmospheres dear to Joy Division: the ones with Peter Hook's heart-wrenching bass and Ian's desperate voice. Many of us will reckon with this track and our own ghosts. And with the rest of the album: the punk of "Male Wife", the magnificent decay of "East", the psychedelic veers à la Pink Floyd with ("Don't Die Jim") and without ("99p" )  Syd Barrett, the perfect hit for a  screamadelic  rave  with "Come Taste my Mind".

 I swear that, sitting in the carriage listening in the earphones to the synthetic prayer of "God, Let Me Be Kind", I really would have liked to meet Nick while he was working as a train driver on routes linking Surrey to London, once the Earl Brutus project collected just two pennies to fail after this album. And maybe ask him if he was afraid.

It's too late now, a couple of years ago he joined Jeffrey and surely they would have made peace. I bet my old record player that once again they are playing  together my favorite song.