Lydia Lunch & Cypress Grove
A Fistful of Desert Blues

Summer Listens #1

If this year you plan to go on a nice road trip through sun-scorched lands, even vaguely desert-like, for your vacation, you absolutely must procure this disc.

It’s been a few years, specifically since I curiously entered a small record shop in Fez, that I have lived with a slight but persistent desire for desert blues (a label I couldn't even define for you). Seeing Bombino live in January, the nomadic shepherd from Niger, the enfant prodige of the six strings, who was supposed to be the rising star, the great promise of desert rock, hailed by the specialized press as an angel of purity halfway between Jimi Hendrix, Mark Knopfler, and Berber folk, did not quench this desire. I did not leave the event enthralled, and even then it was not the chance to enrich my collection with one album that could belong to this genre.

Then, from the States, the strange duo Lydia Lunch & Cypress Grove approached me with this work that attracted me from the title and the cover. Since I often act through sublimation, “A Fistful of Desert Blues” could finally be what I was looking for, endorsed by a name as big as Lunch’s. Ultimately it was not (and I will tell you why), but “A Fistful of Desert Blues” remains a great album that could properly dust up your summer (as long as someone up there among the clouds decides to turn off the faucet).

Cypress Grove (aka Tony Chmelik) was part of the last phase of the now-dissolved Gun Club, and his presence in the operation explains itself well, given the strong leaning towards southern and country-blues sounds endorsed by the band of the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce. A bit less, at least theoretically, can we explain the involvement in the project of a no-wave icon (particularly from the New York scene), that exquisitely “metropolitan” talent that is Lydia Lunch. Instead, we ought to know that the corpulent singer has resided for years in Barcelona, leading a more - let’s say - tranquil life: the fact that the album’s atmospheres are inspired by the Iberian region of Almeria further clarifies the matter.

The collaboration between the two started a few years ago in a tribute album dedicated to Pierce’s figure, an operation in which the devoted Chmelik assembled quite a cast to revitalize the last fragments of songs recorded by his old mentor, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1996. Two of the pieces developed during those sessions (in 2006) featured the imposing presence (in every possible way) of the American singer, with whom the chemistry must have been evidently good: hence the idea of creating an album written four-handed.

We then arrive at 2014: “A Fistful of Desert Blues” consists of twelve tracks that, while maintaining a single mood (easily inferred from the overly programmatic title), display various nuances, even risking falling out of theme in a couple of instances. Inevitably, the language of the crepuscular ballad predominates, afflicted by Lunch’s cursed crooning, which, even if she never had an excellent voice, sells charisma for sure. Her now decrepit and alcohol- and nicotine-ravaged voice mainly settles on the whisper/groan and scrape narration pattern: an unsettling poetry that claws and bites on the enveloping lash of Chmelik’s visionary acoustic guitar sessions, only at times sprinkled with percussion (often hand-played) and the indispensable contribution of electrified six strings, which, between feedback slides, slide caresses, and rare moments of rhythmic or solo protagonism, become bearers of a dreamy and cinematic psychedelia. With the obvious contribution, where necessary, of harmonica, field recording, bass, piano, and keyboards: a result, ultimately, not far removed from the slow-motion nightmare realized by Earth in that masterpiece known as “Hex (Or Printing in the Infernal Method)”, or from the snapshots taken by the divine Neil Young’s improvised guitar for the “Dead Man” western film soundtrack. Perhaps with a final output a bit too polished, boasting crystalline sounds, good arrangements, a modus operandi that exults in detail care and valuing every single nuance, when perhaps we might have expected something more raw and immediate. And let’s say it: spiritual. But the presumed bourgeois connotation of the disc in question is maybe just a note that concerns my subjectivity, as the music produced here is of great and undeniable charm, and it will be a pleasure to make it interact with your eardrums while, rushing along the sizzling asphalt of the endless highway, you leave behind the dust and magic of breathtaking landscapes.

Then, going through the inner notes, one discovers interesting details: for instance, the fourth track, “Revolver,” is credited to Mark Lanegan (well-versed in desert sessions), even though the track isn’t pulled from the singer’s repertoire but extracted from the album “Ballad of Broken Seas,” resulting from the collaboration with Isobel Campbell (still 2006). Another curiosity: in “End of my Rope,” we find behind the microphone Carla “Evangelista” Bozulich, yes, relegated to backing vocals, yet whose support becomes fundamental to invigorate what ultimately emerges as the most lively and engaging episode of the album.

In the final scraps of the work, in fact, we find the most energetic tracks, where the electric guitar roars again, urging all that tamed rowdiness, which lay dormant, to break free in the first eight tracks: in the driving “Tuscaloosa" Lunch’s singing becomes almost rapped (or at least unable to contain an urbanity perhaps out of place here); in “The Summer of my Disconnect” the groove (bass/drums/guitar) increases up to skirting the southern-rock tout court;   in the aforementioned “End of my Rope” (irresistible) Chmelik indulges in a chilling solo that finally fully expresses his potential; while the concluding “TB Sheets,” enriched even with a brass section, ends up constituting a case apart from the rest, as with it the two seem to want to momentarily flee the vastness of the open spaces explored until then, to seek refuge in the smoky moods of a nightclub, where of course Lunch feels immensely at ease.         

If anyone like me was looking for a pure, orthodox manifestation of the genre, they will come across a work that, for the history brought by the two main actors, cannot have the rigor suggested by the title, inevitably overstepping its boundaries to embrace a broader and more complex vision of “desert music”, which nevertheless does not deny the authenticity of the operation. Therefore, all that’s left for you is to fuel up, let go, and surrender to the uncompromising vastness of the wild and forsaken world Cypress Grove and Lydia Lunch talk about!

Have a good trip, everyone!