Music Arcades: Pussy Galore: Dial 'M' for Motherfucker

I hadn't made the connection between Pussy Galore and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion before. Posibly because the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion didn't exist last time I played, or thought about, this record.

Pussy Galore were one of those New York guitar bands (would the NME have called them post-no-wave?) in the second division behind Sonic Youth, at the back half of the eighties. Just the one Peel session to their name. I remember this name being shambling racket, too diffuse to have any real bite. And twenty or so years on, it still sounds like that. Sort of like Big Black without the ascetic discipline.

And, like Big Black, there was a problem displaying the album title too obviously. Those seem like innocent but prurient days, now that we're awash in the likes of Holy Fuck and Fuck Buttons.

Wikipedia adds a nice spin to this, however, revealing that "Dial 'M'" was considered the acceptable option, compared with the band's first choice title, "Make Them All Eat Shit Slowly".

The same Wikipedia entry also refers to "studio trickery" as "many sequences on the album appear to run in reverse, sometimes mid-song, seemingly for no apparent reason". I found that intriguing at several levels. Firstly, I hadn't noticed this on a first, admittedly casual, listen. Second, what reason do you need to run in reverse? Satanic intent or subliminal brainwashing? Some grand creative concept?

But as a long-time Eno fan, I'm also intrigued by any one who appears to be using the studio as an instrument. So I listened a second time to Side 1, and kept an ear out for studio trickery and backwards sounds. They're there, all right. But the whole experience is so messy, such a shambles, that it's easy to see how I missed them at first: the sounds that run in reverse are only very marginally different, and less coherent than, those that run forwards. It's not that Pussy Galore's trickery is lacking in cause, so much as that it lacks any effect.

Not nearly as scary as yesterday's 1989 album.