Rowland S. Howard
Teenage Snuff Film

Angular, diaphanous to the point of barely seeming of this earth. Fender Jaguar held with the neck horizontal to the stage upon which he staggered while spitting bursts of sound. A cigarette perpetually dangling from his lip, and his face partially hidden by a bluish smoke cloud. Such is the mythological image of Rowland S. Howard, rightfully fueled by Teenage Snuff Film, his first solo album released after more than twenty years of career, which had to wait another twenty years to reach its first real release in the United States thanks to the 2020 reissue on Fat Possum Records.

The story begins in 1995, when after the long European stint and a short American stint following Lydia Lunch, Rowland S. Howard decided to abandon his status as an apolide artist and return to Australia, to his native Melbourne. This decision was likely influenced by attempts to piece together fragments of his life shattered by heroin and his last incarnation, These Immortal Souls (a band formed with his brother Henry, Epic Soundtracks, and then-girlfriend Genevieve McGuckin). Both attempts ended with clumsy outcomes in both cases.

So, Rowland, left without a single recording contract, decided to make a solo album for Reliant Records, a small independent label in Melbourne (UK release handled by Cooking Vinyl, a British indie label) and enlisted the help of two old friends, Brian Hooper (already bassist of Beasts of Bourbon and Kim Salmon And The Surrealists) and the usual Mick Harvey (drums and organ). The result is Teenage Snuff Film, perhaps the most beautiful album in his discography and certainly one of the most beautiful of mine. An album that hovers with the influence of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. But in drawing inspiration from such icons, Rowland is never didactic; he devours them, digests them, metabolizes them, makes them his own in substance and bends them to his style, assimilating and blending them into his writing. Teenage Snuff Film centers on stories of unrequited love, relationships breaking perhaps for no reason at all, just due to the malaise of living. Perfectly on theme are also the two very personal covers, “She Cried,” recorded in July 1961 by Teddy Daryll and better known in the 1962 version by Jay & the Americans, and the surprising reinterpretation of Billy Idol's "White Wedding," which rises well above the original. But Teenage is above all, in a more or less obvious way, an album of majestic and chilling murder ballads (few albums have lyrics where the words gun, knife, and blood recur so frequently) that ideally seem almost connected to the excellent album by friend/antagonist Nick Cave, but Cave's is declared such from the title. However, there is a fundamental difference between Cave's and Howard's work. The former is a narrator outside the story; he is an outside observer of the events involving the characters evoked: Joy, Stagger Lee, Henry Lee, Elisa Day, Loretta, Mary Bellows, Crow Jane. Rowland, on the other hand, is not a storyteller of others' stories but is a part of them, in some way speaking about himself. As indeed he once stated in an interview given to promote the first album of These Immortal Souls, after the Birthday Party experience, where he strived to write lyrics that could be interpreted by others (Cave), now he wanted to write songs “that were Rowland Howard songs, that expressed me”. Seen in this light, therefore, Teenage is even more desperate and tragic. Desperation and disarming beauty coexist in all tracks of this album where indistinct female figures parade as both muses and antagonists. The album opens with the intense ballad “Dead Radio,” which from the first notes drags us into the entwining darkness, and ends, after a constant dramatic crescendo, in the electric apotheosis of the driving “Undone” and the explosive “Sleep Alone,” passing through the minimalist “Breakdown (and Then…),” the pulsing and hallucinated “Exit Everything,” the poignant “Autoluminescent” that seems almost like a prayer, an illusory moment of transcendence, a luminous way out. But Rowland doesn't believe it and dives back (and we with him) into the violent guitar storm of the concluding “Sleep Alone,” a denial black as pitch. And should the listener have any doubts, Rowland clarifies: "Love mine, I am less than nothing, I am a misanthrope". And then recites: "This is the journey/ To the edge of the night/ I've got no companions/ Only Celine on my side/ I don't need nothing from no-one/ The needle's in the red/ Nothing to lose/ Everything's dead". A chilling verse that encapsulates the perfectly solitary atmosphere that envelops the entire album, emphasized by Howard's deep and evocative voice.

Teenage Snuff Film is a practically perfect album, without a single weak track and not a note out of place. A powerful work that grows over time in richness and depth. The unjustly overlooked masterpiece of a legendary artist, composed of dark ballads, all indispensable, magnetic, fatal, tormented by the electrifying crying jag, the Fender Jaguar that instead of weeping sweetly, inflicts pain, abrades, carves furrows into the listener's soul, dispensing notes dense with reverb and feedback, as Howard sketches his final self-portrait of the damned artist, of a beautiful loser.