Following up on 2004’s psychedelic ‘Fur’ release, the West Country trio, the Archie Bronson Outfit surface from weeks spent jamming in the damp, sweaty basement of a farmhouse in Wiltshire with fulsome beards, a tireless, pounding 12-bar rhythm section, grit in their teeth, a few scars on their soul and a taste for the dirty, lurid, seedy things in life; the bruised, shredded blues of ‘Cherry Lips’, ‘Kink’ and ‘Dart For My Sweetheart’ marching like an army of dog soldiers through a dissolute town of vampires in America’s Deep South – a flag of confederate pride in their hearts, blisters on their hands, blood on their trenchcoats and whilstling like demons to the tune of ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’.
Signed to independent label, Domino, after a chance encounter with label founder Laurence Bell, the album rattles and hums through a taut, intense 40 or so minutes of gritty blues-rock that promises to put the dirt back under your fingernails and see you unshaven and unkempt for weeks to come. Recorded with producer, Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings Of Leon) ‘Derdang Derdang’ thrives on the pure and uncomplicated way the tracks have been put together with barely a single deviation from the hardcore riffing, basement drum sound and relentless, stitched-over suicide of Sam Beaton’s grizzly mother’s ruin. In fact only the spaced-out sci-fi of ‘Modern Lovers’ and the gentler pulse of ‘Cuckoo’ threaten to disrupt the paradiddling military-snares and Velvet Underground luna-delia, although Beaton’s Jim Morrison phrasing on the faintly sinister ‘Rituals’ does allow secret fourth member, Duke Garwood on clarinet and rhaita, the rare opportunity to extend this piece of theatre, even if it’s the lover’s lament of the last man standing, ‘Harp For My Sweetheart’ that truly defines the character of the band: tired, bloodied, weary, yet still more likely than you to be awake at dawn.
Who better to tell you about love than one who has been beaten, cursed then buried by their love out in the woods under an inch of peaty scrubland without so much as stone to mark their worth?
Who knows? Perhaps the album of 2006.