This is another one, like that early Spiritualized album, that I swapped with David F. This time it was me doing a tape for him. I'm not sure what led me to do that, but he was so excited and enamoured by it that he made me see it in a different light. When a little 'worse for wear', he would quote lines like "it's a lot easier to accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour when he looks like Willem Dafoe". There are many better lines than that, though.
The Power of Pussy is one of those early nineties albums that I'd count as the highwater mark of a certain style of American indie, along with Hit to Death in the Future Head and the best of His Name is Alive. It's a different tack to the Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr/Big Black axis of the late eighties, but these albums are teeming with ideas, musical, production, lyrical. And never delivered with more of a sly wink than on The Power of Pussy. In the extended Folk Song at the end of the album, Ann Magnuson says,
I'm not trying to be flippant, or irreverent, or exploitive, or sarcastic, or ironic, or post-modern, and this is not a parody. Get it? Got it? Good.
It's not so much a case of the lady doth protest too much, methinks, but by always treading a line so close to irony and parody, there is post-modernism oozing from every pore of Bongwater like the perspiration of someone who's not sure if they're going to get away with it. Even though they do.
Magnuson's kinky dream narratives, including Chicken Pussy and Nick Cave Dolls, don't go stale with repeated listening, so fine is her delivery (her main work was in acting, after all). But they rub up against the unusual choice of covering Dudley Moore's Bedazzled and Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, by The Weavers and Jimmie Rodgers, both of which are done more or less straight — though the latter has a spoken coda that seems to be about coming to terms with a family member dying of AIDS, which uncannily reframes the lyric.
I've already mentioned that earlier Bongwater fails to live up to this standard; and I've just tried the later, final album on Spotify, which doesn't quite cut it on first acquaintance.
I just stumbled on the CD in the racks of Our Price on The Moor (£12.25), where I knew the name Bongwater from their contribution to The Bridge Neil Young tribute. I don't know whether I clocked that Kramer, producer of Galaxie 500 (and later of Low), was half of the band. Obviously I can't have missed the cover, which looks like something out of One Million Years B.C.. I won't tie myself up in knot about that like I did the other day, but it's part of the ur-kitsch feel that runs through the album.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Comments