The Morlocks
Emerge

"Rock is not a dinner party, it is not a literary party, it is not a drawing or embroidery, it cannot be done with such elegance, with such serenity and delicacy, with such grace and courtesy. Rock is an act of violence.” (Loosely inspired by the thoughts of Mao).

Rock doesn't need Sting's nerdy glasses, nor does it need duets between Bono and Pavarotti. It has nothing intellectual about it, it is ignorant. It is a fruit that is already rotten as it grows in the most disparate places, maybe San Diego. You know, that sunny little town in Southern California, almost at the border with Mexico, teeming with chicanos sprawled on the bright lawns of Balboa Park and punkers holed up in perpetually dark rooms with a floor of empty beer cans and nothing to eat in the fridge.

 Leighton Koizumi and his friends live for rock and drugs. The Gravedigger V had made a great record (All Black and Hairy) for Greg Shaw's Voxx label but Leighton no longer felt like a kid tied to the sixties, "what's the point of resembling the Pretty Things in 1985?" No revival imitating that sound, no side-parted hair, no beatle boots. He's no longer interested in the youthful, after-school vibe that surrounds that type of music. Because now Leighton is on the street waiting for his man with twenty-seven dollars clutched in his hand: reality is harsh . 

 Noise, chaos, violence, and the photo of Iggy pinned to his bare chest like a clock around a rapper's neck, just to say: I am the different one, the one you think is stupid and inferior. "Born Loser" well expresses his creed, rowdy voice and vulgar, brash rhythm with the sole purpose of making noise.   A constant that repeats itself throughout the eight tracks of "Emerge": the Morlocks smash the Stooges, Radio Birdman, the Stones, Motorhead even more savagely and the tracks reel off one more beautiful than the other for the immense feeling capable of emanating from these five lunatics. "In The Cellar" with its Gun Club-style accelerations of "Sex Beat"; "One way ticket", a ticket for a one-way journey into the roughest psychedelia; "By my side", pure garage violated in the most raunchy way possible; "24 hours every day", a rhyme tortured by fuzz; "Project Blue", a sweet (!?!) ballad with jingle jangle and Byrds-style choruses (if it weren't for that solo drenched in acid and Leighton's savage screams); "Judgement day" that hammers hard on the acoustic nerve with the guitars trying in vain to shout louder than a singer who is a legend.

 His thin figure looms over everything with those long black hair covering his oriental-featured face, high on acid, master of blasphemous ceremonies devoted to the cult of Osterberg the iguana, constantly teetering between the desire for success and fame and the lure of the street among tramps and outcasts. For a period (around 1990) we thought we had lost him forever but fortunately, he is still among the living.

 But today he is neither a star with a villa in Malibu nor a tramp on the road. Perhaps none of the two things worth living for....