Words by Jason Lee
The onset of Surly Season is nigh upon us and while we don’t mind there being a slight chill in the air in the slightest we do mind the air of menace and ill portent blanketing the landscape lately like deep-pile shag carpeting whose individual fibers are made up of dread, anxiety, and rage which is surely enough to put nearly anyone in a surly mood…
…so when we were invited to check out The Duke of Surl’s new live album entitled Live At Boughton Place (King Pizza Records) we thought “great, these guys oughta be like some crazy mashup of classic doo-wop along the lines of Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl” crossed with more surly ‘70s’/80s goth-rock vibes appropriate to our current season” but far from sounding like the Drifters doing Joy Division the Duke of Surl makes some of the 22least surly-sounding music out there…
…specializing instead in the kind of tunes that in classic Nuggets fashion take good ol’ fashioned rock’n’roll party jams and feed them through a proto-punkish sensibility sharpening every edge to a fine point of sonic precision and raw power like Otis Day & the Knights being covered by the MC5 such as on set opener “October Manifesto” (see above) which speeds up the studio version by a couple of ticks with singer-songwriter-guitarist Will Brown offering to “address the unrest” of our current times mainly by repeating lines like “BOW-buh-buh-BOW-buh-buh-BOW-buh-BOW-BOW” in the midst of not one, but two, scorched-Earth guitar solos like Bowzer with a Big Muff taking Talking Heads’ “stop making sense” maxim to heart…
…supported by the hard-charging rhythm section of Sam Trioli (drums) and Paul Travisano (bass) whose main collective’s settings appear to be “steady gallop,” “mid-tempo stomp,” and “full-on sprint” with splashes of primary color supplied throughout by Pietrfo Gennenzi’s Farfisa organ like the blues, reds, and yellows of a Mondrian accenting the various intertwining (musical) lines designed to set bodies in motion…
…so if you’re looking for an antidote to Surly Season may we suggest you take the “60’s grooves and 70’s fuzz” heard on this platter for a ride (speaking of rides, it’s about a 3-hour ride due north from NYC to get to Boughton Place in Kingsland!) seeing as Duke of Surl’s stated mission is to “[make] you be a freak and shake those cheeks” which in effect makes this Beacon-based band a beacon of sorts for finding one’s way out of Seasonal Affective Disorder which makes it extra appropriate that the its proceeds go to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)…
…and last but not least thanks to Duke of Surl’s new throne master Greg Hanson (King Pizza Records, The Rizzos, Video High podcast) for turning us on to LABP seeing as we’re suckers for biiiiig-sounding live records (produced by Seth Applebaum of Ghost Funk Orchestra so no wonder (and hey we’ll check on the others) and yes headphones recommended for getting fully lost in the immersive stereo spectrum (btw it’s our secret ambition to start a Deli Sessions record series modeled on John Peel and his Peel Sessions for which this album serves as an an source of inspiration shhhhhh)…
…and when it comes to garage rock specifically here we’re talkin’ a genre that doesn’t sound quite right a lot of the time unless it’s played and/or recorded live (or some convincing facsimile thereof!) and Will Brown is so wholly dedicated to 1/4″ reel-to-reel tape as his format of choice–preferably in a garage or garage-like setting which is the most surefire way to make refrains like Little Richard’s “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom” or Duke of Surl’s “WOO-ooh-WOO-ooh-WOO-ooh-OOH-woo-who-OOH” land with their intended electrifying impact as heard on the latter’s “Hey Judy” for instance in an echo of a similarly named vocable-overflowing song perhaps…