John Trubee & the Ugly Janitors of America
Strange Hippie Sex Carnival

THE REVIEW

"I recorded this album in 1987 with less than $1000 in money I saved from my $6.00 an hour job while living in Los Angeles, starving and letting my car die. Zero of being young, crazy, and alienated from the world."

When irony matches with Greek tragedy and the absurdity of an unlikely awareness of the unconsciousness of youth takes hold. Where everything meets on the final road of the quintessential pioneer who, after the ship journey's exhaustion, engages in working his tail off as hard as a bucket wears out on the frontier with an inhuman coast-to-coast journey.

After total annihilation, there is the recovery of frivolity that helps to not go completely insane, and thus it begins with American ballads that stick to you worse than leeches, as magnificent as they are in narrating with nonchalance, and with that splendid western voice of Mark Langton, the past frictions to arrive where the desert meets the ocean.

Electrified country, metallic folk, deconstructed rock, appearances of bizarre little orchestras, desert personified into music, cosmic abysses dazed in mirages, symphonic hyperboles, diligences and caravans of starry cowboys on the Damascus Ranch road. And a joy, a crystalline joy in that sound open to infinite spaces.

Road dust, gold dust, dust of suffering transformed into fluorescent spurts of sour sweat that build a Cactus Odyssey for an American epic that necessarily pursues a whiskey & saloon mythification that stands in for a redemption never shown, not out of malice, simply there was no time to repent, one had to survive.

And the character John Trubee purifies the sufferings transforming them into a magical fluid that floods us with his ecstatic immediacy: "Non ho mai fatto un tour negli Stati Uniti, mai. Non ho mai avuto le connessioni o i soldi per farlo. Sono invisibile, uno sconosciuto impotente. Non avrei mai preteso diversamente."

And what are we doing here if from time to time there was not someone to show us his "disappearances"?