HOME

REVIEWS

- RSS Feed

SoundsXP Presents

tba

On Our iPod

Weird Dreams - Choreography (album)

Crocodiles - Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9) 7”

The Hairs - I’ve Been Working Out 7”

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins - Third Swan single

Cate Le Bon - Cyrk (album)

Tashaki Miyaki - sings the Everly Brothers 7”

Antony Harding - The Birds Sing Goodnight To You And Me (album)

Veronica Falls - My Heart Beats 7”

Latest Forum Posts

Album Review

Tav Falco & The Unapproachable Panther Burns
Lore and Testament Vol 1 Stag-O-Lee

Article written by Ged M - Nov 10, 2011

Originally conceived in 1979 as a Situationist performance art event in Memphis, Tennessee, The Panther Burns fused rockabilly and country blues into a potent moonshine. Later Tav Falco releases (Stag-O-Lee are reissuing eight) highlight the art movement angle much more but the 1980 debut Behind the Magnolia Curtain is memorable for its raw take on music, not so much lo-fidelity as no-fidelity. The late/great Alex Chilton is here on guitar and drums, fed up for a while of being a frontman. He’s joined by Jim Duckworth, later of the Gun Club, and the music school-trained bassist Ron Miller. Their repertoire consisted solely of covers of obscure rockabilly and early rock’n’roll, recorded in single takes with all the band playing at once so that all the instruments bleed together and it’s a case of who’s loudest wins.

The songs on …Magnolia Curtain mix the primitive, the arty and the exotic. There’s feral rockabilly, gritty blues and also a cover of Ary Barroso’s 1939 standard ‘Brazil’, performed as a samba-rockabilly hybrid (you’re bound to know it; it goes “dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum”). Frank Sinatra covered this 50 years ago and many others, including Arcade Fire, have played it since. The best track though is Panther Burns’ take on Leadbelly’s ‘Bourgeois Blues’. Over filthy, fuzzy guitars, Falco stops declaiming the faults of Southern society to start reciting Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. It’s loud, heavy and full of distortion but perfect exhibitionist art-rock.

The Blow Your Top EP from 1983 had new personnel (including Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos), was better recording in New York, and maintained the lysergic howl without the monitors jumping into the red all the time. Little known rockabilly and early r’n’r covers are still the order of the day, with the belting space-twang of ‘I’m On This Rocket’ and Dorsey Burnette’s yelping ‘Bertha Lou’ outstanding.

Like kindred spirits the Cramps and later the Gun Club, Panther Burns had a spiritual connection with roots music, particularly rockabilly and the blues, they possessed style and a sense of theatre and they were wasted and decadent souls, but fun too. Stag-O-Lee’s reissue is a great reminder of what they were like in the first phase, and what that creative collision between performance art and music delivered so well.

Links:
http://www.limbos.org/tavfalco/
http://www.myspace.com/pantherburns