Typewriters clack with their meat cleaver keys,
Stamping their feet in red letters,
White ribbon scriptures hang cracks to the walls,
And I cant catch a break of a word.
Fragments hang backs to the rafters,
Sheets pass their last owner’s best incantations
Up into my skin with precision.
Polka dot dresses swirl through the mind in tail finned gas swilling automobiles. Iced beers drip in sunshine, drive in movie screens show black and white flicks over slicked back black hair and blonde lipstick curls. This is cherry coke sweet. Polished like high chrome in saccharine shades.
We’re still star-fishing our way in and out, back and forth spikes out of Panama City Beach, moving on interstate spines. This is last trip where we go out and back before leaving our friend’s nest for good. Three New Orleans nights and return then it’s not so straight lines to nowhere.
New Orleans is glistening voodoo jewel jubilation with rhythm and heat in the pit of its soul. New Orleans sleeps rough in the dirt of it’s past, it’s disasters and racial divides. It’s truth is a sweet spot between.
Nashville has an ego. Lights, signs and neons all big as that ego with history gone to it’s head. It’s been ‘Music City – USA’ since WSM AM radio cast out it’s shout over 38 states with weekly live shows and recordings. Broadcasts began in 1925, name was claimed 1950 set against rock and roll. ‘Birthplace of bluegrass’, ‘home of country music’, ‘songwriting capital of the world’; There’s plenty of others to pick from.
A full blood moon’s hanging thick over Rockies. Earlier on I saw dinosaur steps and bones, pressed into layers of once-flat beach sand that turned into mud that turned into rock that turned to upended slabs that jut out of the sides of sharp mountains. What was flat nearly upright. What was beach now a cliff. And everything round me got here out of chaos.
Now I’m sat between ridges and ranges and chaos is here in the house… It’s been in my ears and it’s been in car stereos and it’s given long journeys brief fever. Slumb Party’s ‘Happy Now’ is breakneck in pace and in place of a thrill is a pupil dilation from trying to make sense of each track; these things pass quicker than oncoming cars at a speed that I don’t want to print.
I’m a semi permanently disgruntled ass, verging on childishly excitable. I’m vein, over confident and egotistical. I’m a self deprecating jangle of nerves. I’ve just about learnt to get comfy with me and now someone else has to too, and oh does she get my sympathy.
Not too many families are neat. Webs and ties, some loved, some unloved, splinters and fractures fix and unfix; A thousand reasons appear to unite and divide. From the line down to me I’ve been lucky. In the line from me down, not so or not yet.
Rats on Run began here, in more ways than one. Took five years to work out what to do with the offer…
A man I barely knew and his American wife said come stay in the states anytime. He left UK for US and with wife and new life they’re deservedly proud; of each other, their changes, their hard graft and payoffs.
It’s the third in a clean three day stretch of 95+ degrees F here in Austin. Tomorrow’s looking like stretching to four. We’ve wore off sore heads, oozed out our insides and wrungout our ears with slabs of music and noise. Fuzzed 60s garage slams out of bars, so does country, old and new RnB, rockabilly, thrash and New Wave.
I was midway through a write up of their 2017 releases when a new track came landed and knocked them away. Last year saw Victories let ‘Wiccan’ and ‘Mandy Machine’ loose on raw ears, now it’s ‘Fork in the Road’s turn to tear up. The first two are singles I dug out of Spotify. The latter a live video so far streaming only. Their catalogue backs up to 2010.
For a fact off the bat; Each release gets tighter, gets more taught and tougher. In scope and conviction, songcraft, execution. It’s a clear pitched trajectory and timeline and motion.
Rats on the Run 