Jon Spencer Blues Explosion / Catalogue Reissues

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Album Reviews | Released 13 December 10 on Shove!
| By Matt Dyson

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Catalogue Reissues
(Shove!)

Pillaging the best bits from the pioneering blues artists of the 1920s and injecting them with an unhealthy dose of ear bleeding rock n roll zeitgeist is nothing new. Yet nobody mastered this reinvention and carpet bombed it through with such originality and punk ethic quite like John Spencer Blues Explosion.
Both blessed and cursed with being two beats ahead of time, they laid the path for contemporary rock ‘n roll blues in the ’90s, then sadly slipped between the cracks. Fortunately SHOVE! are celebrating the legacy and legend by re-releasing what amounts to an 18 year, six CD summary of John Spencer and his sonic A-team.
‘Extra Width’ is a good a place as any to start. Recorded in Memphis at the end of 1992, it captures the essence of the sweaty, basement-performed garage rock from which all later work was to germinate. It was during these sessions that Spencer put performance into to punk; you can almost hear him bouncing off the walls on ‘Afro’, leering and hollowing up from under the floorboards.
Two years later they were squinting into the sunlight, frying brains and cooking up the playful experimentation which found its way onto ‘Orange’. String quartets twitch to gutter jived blues and backfiring amps via whatever musical street they happened to stumble into.
They were on tour with Beck and the Beastie Boys during this period, and happy for their blues to go wherever you go when anything goes.
‘Now I Got Worry’ is perhaps the brilliantly psychotic aftermath. Blood curdling screams, darting eyes and a ton of nervous energy push an album of songs into a dark room. It’s no surprise the songs are all called things like ‘Skunk’, ‘Wail’ and ‘Fuck Shit Up’.
‘Controversial Negro’ is the solid live album released a year later in 1997. The title was also a playful dig in the cranium at narrow minded critics who simply couldn’t comprehend a bunch of white guys that had ‘blues’ in their name but weren’t ex-plantation slaves sat on a on a porch with a harmonica.
‘ACME’ is as aneurysm of creative ambition. Each track was recorded by Steve Albini and then given to a different producer to remix. By this time it was 1998 and when the band were ‘talking ‘bout the Blues’ it could mean anything from enlisting Dan The Automator to blowing a PA, armed with a megaphone and Theremin.
And if all this isn’t enough, revisit the most obtuse and defiantly unapologetic corners of their first three albums on John Spencer Blues Explosion: Year One. Either that of feed your iPhone through a stack of amps, make your own album and let it all out. That’s sort of the point, after all.