God Hears Pleas of the Innocent

KILLDOZER: “God Hears Pleas of the Innocent” (Touch & Go)

KILLDOZER HAVE a habit of coming up with humungously huge and very long album titles. Their Intellectuals Are The Shoeshine Boys Of The Ruling Elite was one, last year’s Uncompromising War On Art Under The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat was quite another. From such titles you might suspect that Killdozer are a political group. Or perhaps they are a pisstake as large as their album titles? Who knows? Who cares? Killdozer are weird, and God Hears . . . is often a journey into a secluded, rural pocket-hell.

Singer Michael ‘Gerald’ Gerald has a voice deeper than a Welsh coal shaft and his fingers pick bass strings like he grew up picking stones out of barren fields. For a group who have coined some pretty wild and all-encompassing statements on the health of Western society in this time, on God Hears . . . Killdozer tend to zero in on the personal and specific weird incident. (Not that they haven’t done that in the past; zeroing in on the weird, that is.)

‘Pour Man’ is a humpy-bumpy song about a jealous lover in gaol thinking of robins and ‘the little songs they sing’, and wondering what God will think of him having killed his brother because he was going out with the one he loved. “I’m just a poor man with a heart full of love”, it goes.

This is rock’n’roll in a repair shed. Everything is rough and ready. Killdozer may have rough fingers on the pulse but they pulse all the same. And they have a sense of humour. When they rock out, as on ‘Daddy’s Boy’, I could easily see myself lepping about in a mosh pit.

Killdozer are yet another reason why I love American rock ’n’ roll. They are just one of the so many – often unknown – groups there who are uncompromising in what they do. They have flavour. It may taste like a tablespoon of mustard in your mouth by times but better mustard than sickly, sugary pop anyday.

• Gerry McGovern