dan melchior und das menace: thankyou very much
sweet jeebus this has taken a fucking age to write. usually i crank out these things in ten minute bursts of booze fuelled stream of conscience keyboard abuse – you can tell can’t you - hoping desperately to finish before falling asleep or finding myself searching for new additions to my celebrity upskirt pictures collection. are these photographers (in the loosest camera-owning sense of the word) midgets or do they just lie by the side of the road waitinghopingpraying for limos or taxis carrying shortskirtednoknickered teen starlets or semi-drunk tabloid fodder to stop and unload?. not this time. distractions, parties, weddings, sexual reassignment surgery, a spell in rehab… christ.
anyway a surprising new electro- direction for dan melchior, sounding not a million miles away from the dirty synth pop sound of crystal castles or the new yeah yeah yeahs album.
haha.
i kid of course.
it’s more of the same from our wayward wandering ‘garage rock musician’ (you gotta love the wiki inverted comma). a new(ish) ‘band/project’, dan melchior und das menace, and new double lp on s-s records.
he’s evolved (and evolving still) the garage mangled blues of broke revue into something extra special. released the wonderfully titled ‘fire breathing clones on cellular phones’ (among others) under his own exotic name. and now does his shit under the slightly more sinisterly and germanic… und das menace. i’d use the word prolific – not including the abandoned records. but i have a better one – polyphiloprogenitive. oof.
so ‘thankyou very much’ is another slice of raggedy genius, another sixteen well-heeled double slabs of murky balladeering, fuzzy blooze and clever-word-punked numbers, no sight of any billy childish golightly medway shenanigans (thank the lord (although the devil in the flesh lp is one of the few childish-y records i dig)) and the usual exemplar worderry and lyrical waxing. see where graham coxon nicked all his ideas before he slunk back to bluurgh.
it’s his fortyeighth release on his twentythird label. and it’s another beauty. at once spiky and gentle. luxuriant and grubby. like if roy orbison fronted the fall. like messthetics by way of motown. like johnny rotten singing bloody properly while hurling the bachs down a staircase. not comparisons you understand, just a clumsy fumble for understanding.
anyway it’s out on double vinyl deliciousness on ss records. you should have this record. really.
