The 2kDozen 500: #202 - DM Bob & The Deficits, "Bad w/ Wimen"

Good, clattering country music, this. Recorded in 1996 but it sounded as if it could've been thirty or forty years earlier. The voice sounds as though it's being sung through long-worn, unstuck false teeth. The cover of T-Rex's "Jeepster" is nicely chaotic and whistly. And I learn too that they were from Germany. (I think the DM might stand for Deutschmark.) Mid-Nineties Germany this does not sound like. I don't remember it sounding like that; I remember it sounding like Fantastischen Vier and Die Toten Hosen and Back Street Boys. I wonder what it was they were looking to recreate.

Plenty of tracks on it too. "Meanstreak" has exactly that, rattlesnake riffs and drums looking for a rumble.I like it. They haven't cheered up much by "Quit Your Job", echoing drums and old school guitar competing with razored bass bins for the title of the Fuckest Uppest. I can't believe any Bob with this level of gritty swing has problems with the ladies. I can hear The Fall doing a cover of "Cowpower"; I can even imagine MES writing it himself, were he a Texas farmlad instead of a Salford occultist and psychogeographer.

The "Breathless" cover transmits some of the careless magic of Jerry Lee Lewis. What a wedding band they could/might/must have been! "How Do You Spell Love" even has a touch of funky wah-wah in the mix. A rougher and unreadier version of the Blues Explosion catalogue with vocals touched by Jonathan Richman. (Incidentally, you spell it "M O N E Y".) A bit of German and some folksy accordion crop up on "The Same Thing" while it grinds with agreeable lumpen beats - touch of the Tom Waits here, I'd suggest. It could be another cover of some cabaret routine that I don't recognise.

There's a bizarre sloping in and out goes on during "Uh-Oh" that almost seems to demand a new instrument to play it but settles on a curious high-pitch bottle guitar. "Don't watch TV or ride a car...Forty years alone in his/One room home" is the case of one eccentric loner describing another. At least those are many lazy thoughts at this time in the morning. "Blind man with a pistol/Just trying to make a new start". The final track almost makes a "Yard Sale" sound glamourous and uncompromising.

Almost goes without saying that it came from the Peel Archive. Almost. Just happened at the end there.

Rating: No Sign Of Running out of Cowpower