Pussy Galore
Dial "M" For Motherfucker

Pussy Galore is not only the name of one of the most alluring Bond girls ever (in "Goldfinger"), but also the business name of one of the most abrasive and seminal American bands of the Eighties. Alongside the Jesus and Mary Chain, the band of Jon Spencer, Bob Bert, and Neil Hagerty was probably one of the best in that decade to dissect, hack apart, and decompose the corpse of rock, injecting it with hefty doses of noisy avant-garde in an attempt to create in vitro a systematically fractured, raw, spastic, and convulsive homunculus capable of extending its influence to all various noise attitudes later on.

"Dial M for Motherfucker" is perhaps the most balanced album in showcasing the explosive sound mix of the combo: the most untamed rock and roll and primordial blues blended with shards of industrial-dissonant school. The album's framework is composed of ferocious stooges-like spasms, vocal cut-ups, and sleazy stones-like riffs layered on tons of noise, perhaps never so effective in forging a futuristic, mutant, and hallucinatory garage silhouette. All played by three guitars, a keyboard, and a semi-industrial drum set. Certainly not the best musicians in the world, but conceptually already beyond.

Among the grooves of this work, we primarily find more markedly garage punk pieces ("Undertaker", "Dick Johnson", "Waxhead", "Hang on", "Evil eye" and "Wait a minute"), quintessential in reinventing a low-fi route to the rediscovery of blues in a noise key, through corrosive beefheartian spin cycles and heart-pounding distortions. Equally excellent are those more frayed and articulated moments, like the opener "Understand me", dark and murky, and a "Kicked Out" dominated by a dizzying and skewed keyboard tourbillon.
Significant also is the group's reference imagery, well illustrated by the cover (a leather-man breaking into a Bowery apartment, the street of New York prostitutes) to which Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" certainly paid attention: topless bar turmoil, small daily obscenities, giving a patina of sinfulness, brutality, and danger that is the original matrix of rock and roll, with due respect to the many intellectualisms that prevailed at the time.

At the end of the apocalyptic Eighties, this wild and deafening hyper-realist canvas was in its own way one of the most genuine and unconscious acts of rebellion against the system.