Music Arcades: Brain Donor: Love, Peace Fuck

I feel for the purveyors of psych-dark-black-death-blacker-and-psycher-than-all-the-rest-core rock. If you come across like Sunn O))) — where everything is desperately, meaningfully important — you just look ridiculous. If you camp it up like… oh, whoever, you're admitting the ridiculousness from the start, and that robs the music of its threat. Which is almost all it has. Julian Cope and his hairy cohorts chart the Third Way — I'm sure this is exactly how they see it — where they're sincere but sly, witty but committed.

It works well enough for me to have bought this record. Two discs of green vinyl in their lurid gatefold sleeve. You know how the spines on gatefold sleeves of old used to be slim and modest affairs, recognising that us music fans need to pack a lot of records into as samll a space as possible. Now they really go to town with gatefold spines as broad as a goodly wedge of stilton, anticipating that we music fans will have bought this record not to play but to make it impossible for our friends to call by without noticing, I've got Love, Peace & Fuck on vinyl. So there.

Yet it doesn't quite work well enough to convince me. (Notwithstanding their snappy titles, I haven't bought another by Brain Donor.) We're deep in the generational warp now. Thirty years ago a man of 45 wouldn't have bothered with the differences of intent and attitude in my first paragraph: to him it was all crud. A 15-year-old possibly wouldn't have bothered either: judge them only by their riffage. But now these things matter.

Just take a look at this recent picture. Can anyone still see this as menacing, or as a serious portrait of some syncretic biker-pagan sect? Doesn't everyone take one look at those photoshop filters and wonder how this crew still look so tame under an apocalyptic sky? And don't we all look at the bloke on the right and think, I could take him out with one hand and not even spill the takeaway latte grande in my other?

So that's why I sympathise with the purveyors.