GRAND HALLS 21

GOD’S REVOLVER – “Little Black Horse Where Are You Going With Your Dead Rider?” CD ’07 (Exigent, US) – It’s days like this, my friends, that I love my job. Well, ok, maybe this is a 2nd job at best and one that I don’t get paid for in cold hard cash but, well it’s days like this I love it. Here’s why. I’m stumbling around the internet and somehow find myself looking eye-to-eye with a startling drawing of some skeletonized Old West dude in front of twisted, gnarled trees. Yes, it’s the cover art for a CD and the band responsible is called GOD’S REVOLVER. Now I remember Velvet Revolver. They weren’t any damn good. But, this is GOD’S REVOLVER. Wouldn’t a REVOLVER belonging to GOD have to be pretty damn heavy? You would think, surely a helluva lot more than some pansy-assed one made of velvet. Hmmm. The album title is “Little Black Horse Where Are You Going You’re Your Dead Rider?” Besides being one of the longest album titles I’ve heard, dude, that is just impossibly cool. Let’s see, five piece band, two guitarists, song titles ranging from “Scratch Dealt Me A Dirty Hand” to “Iron Fuck.” Time to hit Amazon. And, there it is for $1.75. New. Christ, I paid a buck 75 for the CD and 4-something to ship it. Be that as it may, 3 days later it’s sliding out of the brown envelope and into my CD player. This is a “how can you lose?” It sucks, you forget the $5 and throw it in a sell pile. It’s good, you basically got it for free. I press “play” and some a somber bit of slide guitar comes creeping out of the distance. “Maybe it’s a country-rock thing?” Slam! Crash! Marshalls jacked up to 11 and Les Pauls roaring out of the gulch to take you to the mulla fuggin’ judge! No, this ain’t no country nuthin’, this is Western RAWK! As “Dead Rider Theme / This Long And Lonely Drive To Hell” ends and “Justify” begins, I’m reminded for all the world of a metalized, steroid & Jack-ridden musical variation on the HBO show “Deadwood.” I have no flippin’ idea what singer Reid Rouse looks like, but I’m imagining some big, burly & sweating bearded hombre as he absolutely roars from stem to stern, growling out lyrics laced with tumbleweed and “fuckin’” every other word. Seriously, this cat sounds like somebody stole his GTO, shot his horse and had their way with his woman while he was away. Now he’s ridden back into fucking town and just slammed open the barroom doors, standing silhouetted in the high noon sun at the front of the saloon. Guitar slingers Trey Gardner & Jon Larsen stand, dressed in black, axes smoking like 6-guns as they carve out the raw, overdriven riffs running roughshod through monster crushers like “Preacher’s Flask” & “Cantina Poetry Blues.” Meanwhile, bassist Elliot Secrist & tubsman Adam Loucks unite to form a rhythmic beat-down as deadly as shoot-out on Main Street. That would be good enough, my friends, good enough to have me singing the praises of this snarling, spitting piece of vitriolic ass-kick from the mountaintops. But then, GOD’S REVOLVER go ahead and up the ante. Check out the restrained melodies in “The Holy Breath,” the dusty backroom blues of “Boxes Done Buried” and the absolutely haunting guitar melodies interwoven in the punk-length “Eagle In Reverse” & epic closer “Roca Del Desierto.” Marvel at a lyricist who can somehow resolve concepts that range from “Whose fuckin’ bed are you sleeping in tonight?!” to “Behold a pale horse with a dead man riding, my little girl, don’t be afraid. We’ll meet again someday.” From Alpha to Omega, GOD’S REVOLVER have created a tour d force here that has become, almost instantly, one of my very favourite ablums…period. God, I love my job! 10.0
www.myspace.com/godsrevolver

NOTE: Word has it that GOD'S REVOLVER has signed to Translation Loss Records. Good. More than a few people need to hear music as potent and lethal as this. The fact that you can get this for $1.75 on Amazon while American Idol losers's discs roll out of Best Buy at $12 a clip makes me nauseated.