‘Hot Music Live' stories come in a variety of shapes & sizes & so I suppose in themselves reflect the diversity of the music we are talking about.
You can enjoy the songs of course without giving a hoot about the backstory but I think it can add layers of meaning & gives me an overview of local music's broader issues which is handy for a cultural commentator.
The tale behind the forthcoming new Superhooch album ‘Gallons Of Gold' certainly interested me before I played any of the songs on it & I hope it does you too.
It also says a lot about the band, its resilience and its persistence.
We had a wave of "Covid songs" then we had a few years of material affected either thematically by musicians' experiences or logistically as bands reconvened & picked up the pieces. To be honest, I thought that the final ripples of that era had played out but I should have known better than to make assumptions.
The pandemic knocked the band off its schedule and I'm delighted that after five years of presumably off & on endeavour, they are finally sharing it next month.
It's been worth the hard work & I suspect that the process became so obviously long term that they were able to polish it even more than they would otherwise have been able to do.
The other time dependent aspect is that six year old Frank Worsley features vocally on "Ain't Dead Yet" and "Would You Like a Receipt With That?": I seriously doubt that you'd have had the chance to hear him do that if the album had come out in 2021/2.
Since I've named two of the songs I'd best given you the others straight away: "Liar's Lament", "Attack the Rat", "Such a Shame", "Sitting on my Best Horse", "No Sin", "Kicking Off", "Tracks (Acts I-V)", two tracks called "Le Campane" and the title track itself.
Even if you plunged into the album before spotting the visual cue of the sleeve, two songs with the Spanish for "bell" and others about gold & a horse are suggestive of the Old West and you'd be right.
I tend to avoid the phrase "concept album" which to me has yet to recover from historic abuses, but ‘Gallons Of Gold' is intended as a cohesive narrative: in this case "a soundtrack to a spaghetti western that was never made" which seems fair enough to me.
Was it an effect of Covid or the idea of an outlaw gang or just that they are a very democratic and collaborative bunch, but I like how teamwork seems to have built the album: all music was composed by the band, they produced, mixed and engineered as a unit and all four sing. Benign dictatorships proliferate in bands (and less benign ones) and sometimes that is the only way to achieve unity of purpose. However I'm impressed by Superhooch's approach and maybe you wouldn't be able to play the record had it not applied.
The lyrics are by Chris Worsley and Johnny Kingham, either separately or together and bassist Steve Clarke mastered the whole. (The final band member, if you don't already know, is Anthony "Peanut" Marshall who sings and he plays drums & synthesiser).
The band have long projected a very piratical image so I suppose the evolution to the current context is fairly natural: though I don't anticipate their donning cowboy clobber, the outsider vibe remains. And it's quite a swaggering one.
This attitude endures though another key element of the necessarily long creative process was one of self reflection & going back to first principles.
On one hand this was a concrete exercise as they created a self-made record with plenty of technical trials & lessons. On the other it seems to have been a conscious effort to retain their psychedelic rock reputation & skills but not to replicate any sense of a Superhooch formula: thus potentially diluting their music & its value.
Hence you get tracks you might expect to find on a soundtrack album rather than a rock one and they could let influences like Ennio Morricone into the mixture. And he's one they specifically cite. I am pretty sure I detected a nod to Ry Cooder also.
And I use the phrase mixture deliberately: there is so much in these tracks (again they had time to consider this) and Chris tells me that they also wanted to inject some aspects of the avant garde: and it shows. Like many other albums which draw me back repeatedly, ‘Gallons Of Gold' reveals more details on each play. Some tracks are especially dense in sounds and they haven't been afraid to step outside normative structures when they feel they could tell the tale better by giving us something other than the unexpected.
As the film doesn't (yet?) exist, it's impossible to map the songs to any actual visual image or narrative, but the whole collection seems to relate impeccably closely to whatever they had in their heads: so we'd best imagine that from the music we have. It's clearly a set of songs serving a story rather than a random collection of vaguely spaghetti western style tracks.
That said, the narrative arc, sampled via that avant garde, lens is far from easy to follow: practically it calls you back to try again which works to the band's favour but also reflects the environment. The impressionistic lyrics give a good idea of people who may have been at the peyote or like the gang in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" go mad in the unrelenting heat in the vain pursuit of gold.
However there is one ingredient which I haven't mentioned which I think is essential to understanding ‘Gallons of Gold': humour. You probably got that when you saw one of the songs was called "Would You Like a Receipt With That?". Smug self-absorbed concept albums which gave the phenomenon a bad name took themselves terribly seriously: this one inserts a tongue into the collective cheek & reinforces the whole by doing so. It's not a cheap parody and it's not even "Blazing Saddles". If anything, it reminded me of "Straight to Hell" : Alex Cox's 1987 cult classic (if you've not seen it… then do).
The playing of course is immaculate but for a band described as "brutal" in their approach, the album opens options for completely different approaches and they must have enjoyed stretching their own musicianship. That said, setting aside the obviously cinematic soundtrack orientated tracks, you could imagine the others, ripped out of their context, still fitting seamlessly into a Superhooch live set alongside earlier material: the brutality remains, only it's deployed where the story requires & not everywhere.
I don't know if the band have a single in mind & I'm in something of a dilemma: should I, having just praised the whole, be advocating singling one track out of it? To be honest you do lose something this way but given what I said above about the enigmatic lyrics (and the delivery also makes some harder to follow), it probably doesn't matter much: Superhooch fans are unlikely to mind.
The songs, despite the setting and the intake of new influences are not pastiche pieces nor period recreations. I'm not sure when the story is intended to take place but the title track suggests that as part of their extravagant journey, time travel as well as geographical has taken place: they appear to be transported to early 1980s New York City. Or maybe it's just in their minds? It's one heck of an impressive song though.
"Liar's Lament" is less frantic and swings round an elastic bassline and acoustic & harmonic guitar parts: it's the sort of epic that the album requires & I'd be very disappointed if it didn't get into the live set & stay there.
"Attack the Rat" veers much more to the bonkers end of the album continuum while "Ain't Dead Yet" jumps back into the TARDIS to around 1970 and invites Jimi & Sly into the party. It's that sort of a record: eclectic rock which quite apart from the story throws you continually off balance. Predicting what comes next isn't an option.
Thus we also get treated to classic heavy rock ("Such a Shame": another essential for performance in my opinion), the Gothic ("No Sin"), Post-Punk ("Would You Like a Receipt With That?") and more of the bonkers ("Sitting on my Best Horse"). Something for everyone you might well say. And each rather glorious in its own individualistic way. If you are anything like me, you'll keep finding a new "favourite" until you play the next track.