Rowland S Howard, 'Pop Crimes'
What:
Pop Crimes
Who
Rowland S Howard
On:
Liberation
Launch:
Thurs Oct 29, 8pm at Prince Bandroom with Kes Band and The Dacios. Tickets $22 +BF from here.
Rowland S Howard is a true poéte maudit and treasure of Australian music. From his hallowed start in the Boys Next Door through work with These Immortal Souls, cameos with Lydia Lunch, cult solo album Teenage Snuff Film, production for Melbourne decadents HTRK and now his new auteur outing Pop Crimes, Howard has been the most rarefied and unaccountable of local figures; an impossible, maligned, hyper-aesthetic style icon whose songwriting and economic destruction of guitar syntax changed the sound of erotic longing and resignation in avant-rock forever.
Australian music commonly trucks in outlaw myth, loveless voids, wasted oblivion and other sub-urban Western tropes, but never as truthfully as Howard's version on Pop Crimes. Songs like ‘Nothin'' - with its lyrics ‘Sorrow and solitude / These are the precious things' sung against ghost-spine guitar lines - and ‘The Golden Age of Bloodshed' - in which Howard asks ‘Does the hissing of coiffured snakes / Dessicate your soul' amidst an exhilarating, resigned-to-death atmosphere - haven't a hint of theatricality; want for nothing; and propose no exit. As intense and poetic as Australian rock'n'roll gets.
Release: Album
To Cure: A quiet weekend
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