Rowland S. Howard
Teenage Snuff Film

Are you familiar with Freebird?

Who isn’t. The good-natured and enveloping ignorance of the Southerners who wrote Sweet Home Alabama, the smell of swamp and fried chicken. Vines and slavery. In short, Freebird is about the metamorphosis of a man into an albatross (not Baudelaire’s, but neither just any bird, to avoid easy linguistic ambiguities with sexual undertones). An albatross that ends up not giving a damn about anything or anyone because he is free, in a way that stimulates a 13-year-old’s hormones at 200% in the grip of the live version… “Cause I’m as free as a bird”.

R. S. Howard is like that albatross. Except he rises from waves black as pitch, dripping with oil and other horrid liquids that weigh down his wingspan and unbalance his flight like the heroin addict who was not the bird but the man. He swerves among the winds, vomits tar, launches his piercing cry to a sky whose leaden hue does not reflect his heart but the actual and intrinsic reality of the world and music. Being completely high, fragile in a world of people spouting nonsense and women you fall in love with but who don’t love you back, is the essence of that sky that those eyes shrouded by the dark liquid glimpse on the horizon of a sick and sputtering Australia.

R.S. Howard was the famed guitarist of the Birthday Party and the ideal counterpart for a young and rebellious Nick Cave; but while the latter traverses a tortuous path, with his flashes of redemption, sure, but maintaining at sea level, Howard flies. He flies, damn it, beyond any pre-set path already trodden by others before him, he retains an already weak and alien body devastated by addiction and shows us how only dirty, wounded albatrosses can fly at the height of angels. An artist like Howard, who at 16 had already written a song like Shivers, later interpreted by ALL Australian musicians who came to matter even just for a second. Shivers which spoke of a tremendous and suffered love, but only at first impression, as those were the words Howard hated precisely because they were used by those around him to talk about love… “I’ve been contemplating suicide but it really doesn’t suit my style”. A paradoxical irony, impossible for a sixteen-year-old who wasn’t alien. Alien as those young fools were to him, so far from the devastating purity of the feeling, necessarily devastating because he could define it as such. An artist like Howard who goes through the English depression of the Birthday Party, to then emerge as a winner and reach the stars of the experimental firmament and the bottom of the heroin pit and disintegration.

Poetics of self-destruction already reverberated on the amplifiers, eternal scars, abandonments: many loves, perhaps few worthy of this name for him, the satanic and tremendously, tenderly captivating figure of Lydia Lunch… solo albums, years later, following a void that swallowed the embellishments of the soul, the feathers of that albatross. Now he is naked, now his soul is just spirit, just essence, only Teenage Snuff Film, that absolute masterpiece. The end has come for the flight of the albatross, now in an ethereal cage he is to receive a Silver Chain for each link of which there is a love left to burn in the cold of the ignis fatuus, ashes buried by tears and obsidian. Teenage Snuff Film is one of the best albums ever by one of the best guitarists ever. There’s no bullshit or too many words to be spent: that albatross soars in a mythological empyrean, shining in a heavenly hell of sublimated senses that not even the fusion of Milton and Eliot’s cosmologies could have completed (it would have taken music): Autoluminescent.

I apologize for any syntactic unpleasantness, this stuff can’t compromise.