Thin White Rope
Moonhead

Davis, a college town 18 km from Sacramento, California; more than five decades ago. Two faithful souls, one raised in the nearby Mojave Desert, loyal for over a decade; behind them, assorted by format, a dozen records, none less than respectable and one live album that rivals the intensity of the Allman Brothers or the Grateful Dead, or perhaps even matched by Blue Öyster Cult. The music: a passionate hybrid born from the bloodline of Delta and countryside immigrants, educated traditionally but not overly strict (indeed with more than a few psychedelic concessions) and sent to a school where "modern" teachers, who had arrived from those Eastern metropolises that were in vogue a few years prior, also taught. It emerged immediately autonomous and mature, but wise enough to allow itself to continuously reinterpret everything with great respect, drawing from Duke Ellington and Dylan, Hendrix and the Suicide, Bo Diddley and the Byrds, and even crossing the ocean to include Can and Avion Travel (!)... has such a thing ever been seen in the world? A child somewhat of everyone but also no one, recognizable instantly by two verses emerging from the sand-polished throat of Guy Kuiser or an acidic riff or a few notes drawn out from Roger Kunkel’s scorching electric guitar or his own. Music that here can send you stargazing in a cowboy camp with distant feedback howling like a coyote ("Thing") or seeing you eating dust in anger chasing a fleeing herd of Longhorns ("Come Around").

Music that truly excels when, as often happens, it makes you dizzy like standing at the edge of a cliff with the entire desert before you, and the two voices intertwine, the human one is harsh and tense, and the electric voice sometimes like the meowing of a wild cat ("Not Your Default", "Wet Heart"), at other times like a rivulet of molten lead ("Mother", "Take It Home"). And when the human voice is silent there remains the interplay of the two faithful guitars, flowing fluidly, vibrantly, calibrated against the intricate background crafted by their traveling companions, keeping the tension always high and the disorientation deep. Music soaked in that spleen which only Television (for many the band that is emotionally closest to them) managed to convey so powerfully in the past. Like them, ultimately, melancholic, more than them, profoundly visceral.

"Moonhead" is the second LP (for Kuiser their best in the beginning), released in 1987, they were the Thin White Rope... unforgettable. Unforgettable.