The Murder City Devils The White Ghost Has Blood on Its Hands Again

Ive got a sixer of Schlitz and a bottle of ephedrine, a half pack of Old Golds and though my girlfriends not leaving me she will soon enough if I dont ditch this dead-end gig that pays me like Im seventeen, summer-skinned and shiftless which I never was but sure as shit am feeling tonight.

So fuck it, baby. Lets rage. Lets crank some MCD like its the dust days riding the drunk tank straight up the Y2K and my ink is fresh and the irate sin is sexy, thankless and in for whatever now the dawn patrol is skirting Ludlow.

Or lets not at all.

At least, lets not like we are now. You and me and ESPECIALLY MCD. Scratch a bit of that, black cat. I think the two of us still have a bit of great mistakes left in us, yet and maybe one day well find ourselves back in some New Cum City playing Iggy Pop on the Chinese Rocks with the doms and the subs and the trans and the cocaine leather respirators setting our hearts and minds to pin the tail on the soft future rising in riot.

But MCD? Those dudes are a goner scene. An ego trip capitalizing on the revivified stupor of misspent youth which was charming enough on the first clicks of the five year reunion tour but turned, invariably to the audience understanding that though the band had always been a moody and mutilated monster of sex charge and live wire threat, Spencer Moody is just a miserable alcoholic who couldnt be bothered to remember the words to a sixty-second anthem.

Not that the words are worth hearing, anyway.

Truth be told, Mr. Moodys lyrics have rarely, if ever, (by his own slurred admission) been exceptionally poignant. Pretty often, they were pretty dumb (Johnny Thunders, Lemuria Rising) but between the grizzled sac of his young torn howl and the beef of a band bruising the hot end of a stilleto, they read as giddy gibberish, barstool anarchics, embarrassingly relatable screeds for the muzzled which shouldve been called unforgivable at the time but, whatever MAN! BOOM SWAGGER BOOM! DANCIN SHOES! IDLE HANDS! YEOW!

Sadly, on The White Ghost Has Blood on Its Hands Again* the Murder City Devils, as a band, sound pale and denuded, rushed past the scintillating press to some meth lean on lackluster frenzy, parading a weightlessness which cracks hard and early with shrill garage bombastics but twists quickly and irrevocably into a state of tonic-clonic disinterest (thanks, I imagine, in large part to the absence of Leslie Hardy and her tempering organ) and that lack of musical presence makes Mr. Moodys verbiage insufferably apparent and turns what could have been the re-ignition of the whiskey Molotov rock and roll desperately needs to smoke its head out of its ass into a flaming bag of dog shit on the porch.

*Fuck this title.