Nightstick
Blotter

Let's rummage through memory a bit without having to extract something bizarre... after all, I got myself into this tangle, so let's try to find the thread. I was just talking about memory; well, only based on it, I have to say Jesus Lizard. A starting point, that's what I need, and memory has provided it. It's not a comparison, but merely a starting point. Jesus Lizard. Many of you surely remember them, I'm sure of it. Well, taking the raw and squared sound of the Chicago band as a starting point, I believe I’m not too far off. I just said raw and squared sound... Jesus Lizard, alright, this is the start... Jesus Lizard who, for some reason, expose their sound to fattening as if they take it every day to McDonald's to gorge on cheeseburgers, Big Macs, fries drowned in ketchup, and giant cokes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Clear as day, this sound ends up like many American kids and teenagers and turns into a ball of lard, drags itself with difficulty, constantly sweats, and pants. Obesity soon throws it into the coils of depression, which it (our dear sound) tries to alleviate with extraordinary but harmful blends of medications, various alcohols, and mostly hallucinogenic drugs (ingredients for which it already had a certain affection before the obese status), putting even its already fragile mental balance at risk due to the depressive phase. The same Lizards, disgusted by the obscenity of what they’ve done, with the excuse of a car ride to strip off a little, beat their abortion to death and abandon it in a very sordid outskirts, smoky and littered with both human and mechanical carcasses. Without even realizing it, they've ended up in Boston! Tricks of acid trips!!! Our poor wreck finds itself abandoned in an unknown city, with nothing, no money, no food, no alcohol, no drugs, wandering through the port suburbs begging for food and drink from the wary homeless who immediately target it because it's a fatso.

But among the various people hanging around the port, there are three guys, Alex, Cotie, and Robert, who are more affable than the others, showing friendship and interest. So, even in that terrifying suburb, musicians. Nightstick. And the game begins again. And the alcohol and the drugs and the music, especially the music. Yes, because the three guys, otherwise known as Nightstick, are musicians, good musicians, but too devastated, upset, disillusioned, and losers to dedicate themselves to such a sublime art as if it were an idyll, so they go arm-in-arm with our overweight, toxic, and depressed sound, spending a week drinking all day, rolling joints, and dipping small colored tabs on their tongues that are very useful if one desires to wander a little into the abysses of one's infinite. It results in a perfect alchemy. The three Nightstick turn that obese teenager into a terrifying monstrous alienated sociopath, filtering it through the carburetors of the cars clogging Boston's traffic, exhaling it along the factory chimneys, letting it stagnate in the pools of burnt oil in desert parking lots, it shoots into the parched veins of junkies and the swollen guts of alcoholics who beat their wives and children inside hovels lost in the moloch of metropolitan cement. Now the sound is no longer just squared but so monolithic that it progresses in blocks, and "Workers of the world unite!!" is the clear (or rather gray due to smog) manifesto. I wanted to tell this little story rather than write an actual review because it amused me more, given that I believe the same Nightstick were great pranksters, and then it's not so easy to talk about their music.

At the core, there's hardcore (sloooow) mixed with the most wicked and wild psychedelia. Very often, the mad doctor from asylum days revives and injects into the delirious beast hefty doses of noise rock to increase its staggering dissonances. But the best (or worst) are those infamous sound blocks of staggering tonnage that fall on you, one after another, and there's only Alex Smith's hoarse and lost psalm to accompany them. As far as I'm concerned, Nightstick was a fantastic band, absolutely unique; devastated by drugs, alcohol, intoxicated by the carbon monoxide of tunnels, radioactive waste, alienated by kilometers of asphalt and cement stretching as far as the eye can see, in my opinion, Nightstick was the American version and therefore - by necessity - the metropolitan version of Electric Wizard. And maybe this time the comparison holds. I know well that I haven't said much about the album itself, but if you want to discover it for yourselves, it's really worth it, especially if you've made it through this mess I've gotten myself into.