12 ROOTS & BOOGIE HITS BY STINKY LOU AND THE GOON MAT WITH LORD BERNARDO - Stinky Lou And The Goon Mat With Lord Bernardo (Voodoo Rhythm)
Blink and you would have missed it, but while Hurricane Katrina was emptying a pot of stale piss over poor ol' New Orleans, carbon footrpint-activated floods in the Mississippi Delta washed away a bunch of blues detritus and deposited it all over the plains spanning Northern France and Belgium. That's the ground from where Stinky Lou (washtub), Lord Bernardo (harp) and The Goon Mat (vocals, guitar, percussion and everything else) sprang. Global warming sure is one insidious mother."12 Roots & Boogie Hits..." is as retro an album as you'll hear in this digital century. It's more battered about than your grandad's favourite pair slippers and smellier than the inside of his socks drawer. With an opening song like "Show Me Your Tits", it never was going to be a paragon of subtlety. For all you know, your grandad would have sung along to lyrics like "Take off your shirt girl/Take off your bra now/I want to see your girls/I want to see them now" back when he went to strip clubs and didn't need little blue tablets.
For minimally-equipped accompanists this trio summons up a pile of trouble. The package description is true to the contents - nothing new inside - but for all their desire to sound authentic they do manage to instill something of their own."The River Is Laughing" couples blues that's vaguely Chicago in nature with dub production values and a murky vocal, mixed way down low. The possibly live "Promotion Boogie" and its wacky vocal sounds like it's on day leave from the funny farm and isn't going to make it back before curfew. Junior Kimborough only knows what's going down in "Supermarket". Hope he jumps up out of his grave to tell us.
When not playing it for laughs, Stinky Lou and Co can swing or shuffle with the best of them. "Lonely Man" is evidence of that.
The whole album ends on a down note with the oddly brief chain-gang lament of "Ode To You" (a little brother to Chain's "Black And Blue" if you'd like an Aussie reference point; and I can't understand why not when we're talking about a Franco-Belgian band.)
Post-punk art rock, it is not. More like Pre-Modern. But warming and addictive if you have a liking for this stuff.- The Barman
