Gangsters & Morticians (full album) - The Hoods [1992 Garage Rock] IF YOU LOVE EVERYTHING SIXTIES FROM BEAT TO PROTO-PUNK, THIS IS A WONDERFUL ALBUM WITH MIKE STAX AND FRIENDS.
Sometimes you're born in the wrong period. Ask anyone who was born in the Middle Ages or the six million Jews born while a little mustached dwarf was devouring the world.
Or, if you don’t appreciate the macabre, ask the Hoods.
On paper, and also in rehearsals, a band that could have ruled the world. Instead, a blanket of indifference was thrown over them that soon turned into a shroud. Even today, if you type their name into Google, you can barely find out that someone sold their record on eBay and that someone, thank God, actually bought it. Little else.
We are at the dawn of the nineties, and the explosion of the grunge and crossover phenomenon has shifted the focus elsewhere, while the old "scene," already shattered and scattered by the progressive “hard” turns of many leaders and the dissolution of some icons, effectively disintegrated.
In San Diego, two of the most active bands have put their instruments back in their cases.
One was the Tell-Tale Hearts, descended directly from Olympus to spread the Gospel on earth.
The other was the Trebels, famous in town for leaving Johnny Marr looking like a fool during the New Sounds Festival, with his jack in hand waiting to jam on stage with the band.
From the first comes Mike Stax. From the second, all the others. They’re joined by Ron Swart, who ended up in San Diego after the dissolution of Just Colours, the Dutch band from which splinters like Kliek and Kek ’66 would emerge.
They end up discovering they were the only ones in town with a copy of Get the Picture? on their bedside table, while everyone else has pulled out Physical Graffiti again.
The train has already passed, but they decide to hop onto the carriages left to rust on the dead tracks of Union Station, down at Kettner Boulevard.
The basic idea is still to fire up the grill under the rare steak of the Pretty Things. But the temperature, although high, doesn’t reach the levels of the Tell-Tale Hearts ovens, which is what everyone expects from Mike.
Gangsters & Morticians sounds different. Not worse.
Only it disappoints the limited expectations of the Tell-Tale Hearts fans.
It’s a more cheerful, more alcoholic record.
But also better played, at the expense of spontaneity.
Gangsters & Morticians lacks the animalistic fury of Mike Stax's previous bands, where mistakes were paradoxically functional to the result; it sounds like an Out of Our Heads played by Stax's session musicians.
It bites. But like a circus tiger. You know it will open its jaws at a small imperceptible movement of its trainer’s eyebrows, denying you the thrill of blood, the sudden feline leap, the torn flesh.
And you can watch it while eating your caramel popcorn, without risking an upset stomach.
