Thin White Rope
In the Spanish Cave

Anyone who has had the (mis)fortune of speaking with me in the last couple of years will have certainly heard of the Paisley Underground and the Thin White Rope. If this review does not exorcise the pleasant obsession with this band, I have probably reached the point of no return and will end up shooting Guy Kyser, freshly out of his Botany Faculty, down in Texas.

Acclaimed by critics, ecstatic from a rock so pure yet so bastard at the same time, much less known to the masses, these (ex)young musicians distinguished themselves from the melancholic rock offspring of the Byrds (see REM) with a dark, introspective, anxious attitude. The singer, guitarist, and composer Guy Kyser was the voice of the suburban kid who smiles at a marginal life, distant from both the Venice Beach praised by the intolerable bourgeois power-pop enthusiasts and the systematic self-destruction of the most renegade hardcore champions of the US underground. Because in Davis, in the middle of the dusty Nowhere, one must indeed be quite well.

Kyser could have been yet another cursed (and dead) artist if he hadn't been wise enough to drop guitar and alcohol the day the gigs no longer covered the expenses to play between pubs, allowing himself a single musical outlet a decade later in the rare and interesting "Mummydogs". "In The Spanish Cave" is a midway work, a musical crossroads that stands between the existentialist punk-new wave beginnings and the rediscovery of a personal "author" rock song with the last two studio LPs. The similarities with Grateful Dead-like iconography are not accidental: the folk that the historical psychedelic pioneers unearthed is the same that Kyser seeks with the opening "Mr. Limpet" (an agitated country with an intro homage to Marty Robbins). The variety of the pieces will remain unique in their discography: the Television-like rock of "Timing", the pure folk of "Ahr-Skidar", the '60s reminiscent rock of "July", and the spectral country of "Astronomy".

The most "known" piece (although the word is quite misplaced) even if not the best is "Red Sun", with its Middle Eastern-like indolence enriched by impactful tex-mex trumpets. Essential core of their sound was the other guitarist Roger Kunkel, responsible for those very personal sliding feedback slashes coupled with the leader's rough voice: listen to the present "It's OK", an exasperated blues, also reprised in the live LP finale ("The One That Got Away", an immense work) to feel one's mind vibrate with every strum. What's missing for a masterpiece? Perhaps, just the poignant intimacy that made the previous Moonhead great and unattainable, decidedly more monothematic but more touching.

If Jeffrey Lee Pierce had stopped collecting needles, perhaps he would have played in Thin White Rope, but his story followed a more decadent course. They left enough albums to enter the legend, without tarnishing their Art.