Rowland S. Howard
Pop Crimes

When Rowland Stuart Howard, an Australian from Melbourne but a neglected son of very provincial London and, on the contrary, a favored son of the avant-garde, middle-European Berlin of the '80s, former Birthday Party, former Crime & the City Solution, former These Immortal Souls, post-punk guitar hero, romantic heroin addict, begins to work on his second solo album, he knows he has liver cancer and that it will almost certainly be his last album. He doesn't know if the time he has left will allow him to undergo the transplant for which he is on the waiting list, but he devotes all the energy he has left to at least complete a new album. Only his second wish will be fulfilled, and in October 2009, he manages to release Pop Crimes before the grim lady invites him to the gala in his honor on December 30 of the same year, just two months after his fiftieth birthday.

Rowland leaves us by gifting a touching farewell album, the testament of a man victim of his excesses, trying to come to terms with the idea of inevitable end, a sensitive and deeply romantic musician, one of the most interesting to have spanned the '80s, '90s, and 2000s. At his side in this last waltz are the ever-present friend Mick Harvey (former Birthday Party, former Crime & the City Solution, former Bad Seeds) on drums and organ, J.P. Shilo (of the Blackeyed Susans) on violin, bass, and guitar, as well as HTRK's singer Jonnine Standish who duets with Rowland on the opening track, which tells us of a girl called Johnny, perhaps the same girl The Waterboys sang about in their eponymous first album. "Pop Crimes," "Shut me down" (already appeared with a different arrangement on the previous album Teenage Snuff Film), "Wayward Man," "Ave Maria," "The Golden Age Of Bloodshed," and naturally the bittersweet "(I Know) A Girl Called Johnny" are dark and beautiful gems, but Rowland's farewell note is held in the two covers, so different by origin yet unified by the stamp of interpretation (so much that they seem to have come out from Rowly's own pen) and by two titles that need no comment: "Life's What You Make It" by Talk Talk and "Nothing" by Townes Van Zandt. Pop Crimes is a poignant and fascinating album in which Howard's Fender Jaguar slashes through tracks with its electricity, supported by a solid rhythm section, deconstructing blues and country and filtering them through the original post-punk until achieving a precious, dark, and dense distillate, sweet and bitter, intoxicating and cathartic at the same time, to be savored by candlelight during the Christmas vigil that year is a waiting for death instead of a prophecy of birth, while Rowland, tall and thin, climbs the dusty path of Golgotha.