forever bad blues band

What if the Velvet Underground were blues cowboys from hell? What if Stereolab drove motorcycles and pick-ups and played shady bars on the Texas border?

Each song on Jonathan Kane's debut CD sounds familiar. Bluesy guitar figures over locked drums and straight ahead bass, all played by Kane. Not unlike a multitude of "drone" albums, these fragments repeat to infinity, slowly changing over time with you hardly even realising. But Kane is working in a style that is far removed from the audio wallpaper of much drone. And while it also has much in common with lockgroove kraut like Neu, its far from that as well. Its sitting on the porch and strumming one chord on your acoustic to the point of the strings breaking, and thats when the change happens. Propulsive urban dirges for modern ghost towns.

Kane has been called "Virtuosic" (NY Times), "Tireless drumming phenomenon" (Village Voice), "Magnificent, Mighty" (NY Daily News), and "Volcanic" (Rolling Stone) from his fierce 3 hour long non-stop playing with La Monte Young's Forever Bad Blues Band and with Rhys Chatham's 100 electric guitar orchestra he is the only drummer and featured soloist. How did he get to this level of ferocity? Probably by being one of the founders of legendary brutalists SWANS. And Kane's debut, February, holds some of the same spirit as M Gira's past work, too. I can easily hear Gira moaning along and strumming the same chord, eyes closed, cowboy boots on, lighting the funeral pyre with sound.

Out on Table of the Elements very soon.

Jonathan Kane - Curl