Plastic Fang

JS and the BE have stayed in New York and gone south at the same time – not a bad move if you can pull it off.

A rethink in the production department (Steve Jordan’s on the board) means some of the gunk has been scraped off the Explosion’s bright pink fuck machine and the fenders have been given a good waxing. Some, I said, not much. The Cramp-y quivers have ceded to a more muscular class of boogie (hints of the Allmans and Physical Graffiti and Stones handclaps all over the place), and Jordan has eschewed the garage fuzz of yore for a punchy, up your nose mix, but the trio haven’t fully ditched the schlock aesthetic. They just moved it from LA and Tex-Mex cemeteries to the campy vampy climes of the Mississippi.

“Ah craaaave the taste of blood,” Spencer jives during the single ‘She Said’. “Ahm gunna piss on yo heart now baybah,” he brags on ‘Over And Over’. “I’m so lonely… I wanna slip down a crack in the sidewalk,” he growls in ‘Tore Up & Broke’, and it’s hard not to think of an undead Iceberg Slim with a bad case of the existentialist bloodsucker blues.

Of course, Doctor John makes his obligatory appearance through the haze. So does one-time Funkadelic fingersmith Bernie Worrell. But mostly Plastic Fang is exactly as you’d expect. No radical new departures, no reclaimed holy grail, no lost gospel of St Thomas, just three blokes in a lather of sweat. With slightly longer sideburns.