Go Rimbaud – Songs In Bad Taste (CD)

Go Rimbaud – Songs In Bad Taste / 2003 Self-Released / http://www.go-rimbaud.com / Reviewed 20 January 2004

When I heard their “Ground Zero Tourist Song” EP, I fell immediately in love with Go Rimbaud (now Angels Fight the City). A modern day Velvet Underground, fed with valium and sugar, Go Rimbaud is a four piece band that play a music that is all but describable. Moving between pop, industrial, camp singalongs, and many other forms of music, Go Rimbaud (itself lifted from an equally innovative Patti Smith song in “Horses”) is a band that works as well in six songs as in two – this is definitely not a novelty act we are talking about. All and all, “Songs in Bad Taste” is utterly compelling, although without another track quite as innovative as “Ground Zero Tourist Song”. Clocking in at a meager 26 minutes, I found myself immediately wanting more from this quartet.

After covering the first EP, I believe that “Ground Zero” was actually included on here in a cleaned-up form, ending quick masterfully with an absolutely insane bass line, worthy of any Fall song. Moving back in time to the mid-1970s, when The Stooges, Television, and the Talking Heads were still rock royalty, the follow-up track “St. Andrews Girl” mixes in a great deal of souther delta-blues riffs with the traditional rock formula, while “Mary Bell Blues” sedates the terror-inducing sounds of Suicide with a Sonic Youth fuzziness. The country “Frankenstein” is reminiscent of one of my earlier bands, The Spackys, and our goth-country epic “Marilyn Manson”. Bouncy sounding, “Collateral Damage” is probably the most radio-friendly track on the whole disc, and it really gets its power from having an early-nineties industrial sound to it.

So, Go Rimbaud has shown that they can put out a longer CD and still have that spontaneity, that irreverent humour, and most of all, that freshness that makes them such a memorable band. The jam session at the end of “If You Can’t Take a Joke You Can Get the Fuck Out of My House” is a perfect end to this disc, a disc in which we have so many different styles, styles that only coalesce at the end, to match the uniformity of the silence that follows.

Rating : 7.3/10

Top Track : The Ground Zero Tourist Song