A Taste Of Prison

LEE HARVEY OSWALD BAND: “A Taste Of Prison” (Touch & Go TG84)

DISPENSE WITH reason, suspend your disbelief. Get ready to confront the anti-rational, the supra-real. Those who seek the reassurance of true beauty should look elsewhere. For the Lee Harvey Oswalds bring amplified brutality from the Jurassic Age of Punk-Metal, and they pronounce their name to rhyme with ‘scum’.

A Taste Of Prison, their second album, was scheduled to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the original Lee Harvey Oswald’s peak-viewing moment in Dallas (or not, depending on your own particular conspiracy theory) on 22nd November 1963, but its release has been awkwardly postponed, nudged out of time firstly by legal wrangles with their previous label, (resolved by the timely death of the owner of said label, who “callousness aside, is now unlikely to cause further problems”) and secondly by vocalist Dredge’s long-term stretch in a Texas State Prison on drugs charges. And as such tales might suggest, this is Class Trash in the way that New York Dolls are Class Trash.

The opening track ‘Theme Fenderblast’ has an H-Bomb in its pants, with guitar violence sucking in energies from the Pistols, The Undertones, and all points beyond. And it just builds, so ludicrous it can seriously damage your bowel movements. There are titles like ‘Jesus Never Lived on Mars’, ‘Van Gogh and the Chemical Haze’ with a long feedback-flayed fade filched from Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, and ‘The Bowels of Rock ’n’ Roll’ with a Bowie-voiced “hope I die before I get old” (honest!) spliced in with short-wave Radio Preacher interruptions.

In some future Museum of Heavy Metal the Oswalds will be slotted into the category of Weird Scenes in the Rock-Mine, where even a wrong-footed stomp all over ‘The Locomotion’ from Grand Funk Railroad via the Sweet works with a grin. Then there’s ‘Junior’s Farm’. Guns N’ Roses did McCartney’s ‘Live And Let Die’ ignoring the fact that anyone who writes lyrics like “in this ever-changing world in which we live in,” just doesn’t understand the basic structure of English grammar. But the Oswalds recreate vintage Wings in ways that make it all go attractively pear-shaped.

The Lee Harvey Oswald Band are a deliciously tasteless mutation. Purchasers should abandon all logic and prepare to experience the trip of a lifetime.

• Andrew Darlington