Howard Rowland S / Lunch Lydia
The Shotgun Wedding
Label: 1972
Genre: 80s Wave / Rock / Pop / Punk
Availability
- LP €22.99 Out of Stock
<p>High priestess of macabre rock and assaultive poetics with impeccable taste in collaborators, Lydia Lunch first joined forces with guitarist and songwriter Rowland S. Howard in the early ’80s in Europe. The duo improvised clamorous live séances as an opening act before Howard’s sets with the revered Australian post-punk act The Birthday Party.</p>
<p>The fortuitous meeting spawned 1982’s Some Velvet Morning EP, and Howard guested on Lunch’s excellent 1987 album, Honeymoon in Red, but the pair’s next true collaboration took until 1991, when they travelled to Memphis to create Shotgun Wedding with producer JG Thirlwell (Foetus, Coil). As Lunch wrote in the liner notes for an earlier CD edition, “Shotgun Wedding is a sassy scrapbook of bruised love songs, somehow buoyant in spite of its obsession with death.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the guests at this wedding are ghastly phantoms and shifty junkies, but the chemistry between Lunch and Howard produces deviant bliss, and Shotgun Wedding showcases each artist equally. Lunch dominates vocal duties, but Howard’s oaken backups propel the rollicking “Endless Fall” to a feverish and resplendent musical climax. Elsewhere, his teardrop guitar leads and penetrating sustain create a menacing atmosphere on “What Is Memory” for Lunch’s trenchant speech to ride atop.</p>
<p>A cover of Alice Cooper’s “Black Juju” closes out the original album—its sinister brooding and fiery outbursts the perfect cap to an album of mad incantations and tarnished eros—while this reissue ends with the cover of Lee Hazlewood’s classic “Some Velvet Morning.”</p>
</div>