rock ‘n roll’s just a ring on ya fingah

I knew it’d come to this sooner or later. Frankly, I’m sur­prised that I’ve lasted this long at girl­pants without talking about McLusky. They are, after all, defin­i­tively my favorite band–the first “favorite band” I’ve had since Radio­head back in high school. With so much music out there to listen to, it’s become increas­ingly hard for me to give a majority of my love to any one band, but somehow McLusky make me do it. (Prob­ably with taunts and insults and a few inhibition-lowering pints.)

Their break­through (in rel­a­tive terms) 2001 album Do Dallas (buy) was a pretty simple but unde­ni­ably bril­liant fusion of Pixies-style avant-punk and Jesus Lizard-style bru­tal­izing guitar noise, and it rocked from start to finish. They got a bit of extra expo­sure when “Lightsabre Cock­sucking Blues”, the album’s biggest single, was used to fairly great effect in one of those weird cat flash ani­ma­tions at rathergood.com. But for the most part the album remained an under­ground classic. In 2003 they released The Dif­fer­ence Between You and Me Is I’m Not On Fire (buy), which, aside from having per­haps the greatest title in all of music his­tory, pulsed with unde­ni­ably dirty and sin­ister vibra­tions. Songs like “You Should Be Ashamed, Seamus” and the album-ending 8-minute drone of “Sup­port Sys­tems” were down­right men­acing, while punkier barn­stormers like “Kkkitchens, What Were You Thinking?” and “Falco vs. the Young Canoeist” proved they could play fast and still scare the pants off of you.

When the band broke up in Jan­uary of last year, well, it sucked. But, y’know, it wasn’t like I was ter­ribly sur­prised. The guys in the band are pretty clearly awful, bitter cunts and it’s really kind of shocking that they man­aged to stick together as long as they did without killing each other. Reports from their leg­endary last show at ULU in London (November 2004) indi­cate that they were pretty much at each other’s throats, redi­recting most of their rage into the songs and let­ting the rest spill over onto an unfor­tu­nate audi­ence member. So, yeah, I’m sad that there won’t be any more McLusky albums, but at least they released two near-perfect pieces of bile before the inevitable self-destruction (and their debut, which cer­tainly had its moments).

How­ever! While the band might have broken up, that doesn’t mean it’s the end of new releases from them. Out this month in both the UK and US is a three (or one, depending) disc set of sin­gles, b-sides, and rarities/live cuts called McLuskyism. Disc 1 is a col­lec­tion of all of the band’s sin­gles. As such, it leaves out a bunch of great album tracks that didn’t get the single treat­ment, but that’s ok. We still have the albums, right?

Disc 2 is a col­lec­tion of their b-sides, and it’s prob­ably the most valu­able part of the col­lec­tion. I’m going to go ahead and say that you could prob­ably assemble a fairly great fourth LP from the mate­rial found there. Songs like “Provin­cial Song” (with its almost SFA-like slow build to total melt­down) and “Love Song For a Mex­ican (2^nd Ver­sion)” (which would have fit pretty easily into Do Dallas’s con­tinuüm) are unde­ni­able in their rock­i­tude. My favorite dis­cov­eries from the b-sides disc are the shortest ones: “Viva Minor Leg­ends” is a 43-second blast of thrash and a great dis­play of singer Andy Falkous’ stop-on-a-dime ban­shee scream, and “Exciting Whistle-Ah (demo)” is 1:14 of hippie-bashing good times.

The third disc is sparser in its gifts, but there are still some win­ners, including early (demo?) ver­sions of “Col­lagen Rock” and “Kkkitchens, What Were You Thinking?” and the absentee title track from The Dif­fer­ence Between You and Me… “Reformed Arsonist Seeks Child Bride” is pretty killer in tra­di­tional McLusky style. The live tracks from the ULU show are chaotic beyond belief, some­times to their own detri­ment, but they offer a fairly accu­rate por­trayal of the live expe­ri­ence. “1956 and All That” comes out best here, as raw and angry as it needs to be.

Anyway, this is an essen­tial col­lec­tion for any McLusky fan. Not exactly a good starting place for someone new to the band, but def­i­nitely a good place to end up in the long run. You can buy it direct from Too Pure Records (buy) or from your choice of the usual internet retailers (buy). Christ on a stick, go and buy it! McLusky don’t have a myspace, so fuck off with that shite, ya cunt.