Bad and Evil but both fucking GREAT.
One half of this split release AA side is great. Annoyingly, the other half is also great. While I'm tempted to leave the review at that and get back to enjoying my cereal and vodka, I'm going to fight the pain and try to write a proper review. Aren't you the lucky one?
Lil' Lost Lou and Paul Hawkins are both London-based post-punk rockers and both excrete a genuinely dirty, raw rock energy that I've been missing for a good few years. I mean can you name a new band that's made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and make you believe that twenty five thousand ants are crawling all over your skin? No, I thought not. If you were grinning with self-satisfaction because you were thinking of Arctic Monkeys, you're an idiot. Playing guitars very fast and screaming in a regional accent doesn't constitute a rock n' roll attitude. It constitutes nothing more than playing guitars very fast and screaming in a regional accent. Surely this is obvious?
'Bad Bad Girl' is Lil' Lost Lou's contribution to this Jezus Factory 7" release and it's such a belter of a tune your stylus will weep. A fuzzy concoction of mucky Delta blues, fucked-up country and lo-fi new wave, you can almost see the wallpaper melting off the walls of the recording studio and spontaneously combusting into a pile of ashes. Lou Psyche's uncompromising vocal is guttural, bloody and furious and serves only to tip the needle firmly into the red zone from where it never returns.
Paul Hawkins's contribution might even be better. 'The Evil Thoughts' is a bombastic, unrelenting and visceral expose of Hawkins's personal foibles, his philosophies and the trials and tribulations that plague his existence.
He's obdurate to be sure; he ignores the advice of his mother to stop drinking, he lays bare his maintenance of an approachable public façade and the ultimate belief that he is going straight to hell without passing GO and collecting £200. Big Fun it ain't.
The pounding drums and bass propel the track to a dizzying and depressing denouement and, refreshingly, there's never a sense of resolution, absolution or redemption. To Hawkins, there's only deterioration, decay and debility - which is exactly how life works.