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November 18, 2010
From Conservapedia to Brooklyn Rock
The Indypendent
by Steve Wishnia
How about something good and something homegrown? Two new CDs by Brooklyn rock singer-songwriters, RebelMart’s Amalgamated Saboteurs Local 21 and Lorraine Leckie’s Martini Eyes, fill the bill.
RebelMart is the one-man band of Scott M.X. Turner, who previously played in the Spunk Lads — “a long-lost English ’77 punk band” — and the Devil’s Advocates. (Disclaimer: I’ve played with Turner in two bands.) He’s a fiercely political songwriter who frenetically flays a frayed-paint Telecaster [electric] guitar. An Irish-American Joe Strummer might be a good place to start your imagination.
Turner was active in the campaign to stop developer Bruce Ratner from demolishing several blocks of Brooklyn (including his favorite venue, Freddy’s Bar) for a taxpayer-supported real-estate scheme. Disgusted after that campaign lost, he decamped for Seattle. As a result, Amalgamated Saboteurs Local 21 has a lot of songs about defeat, laments for a doomed Brooklyn. “Ruby’s Bar still wears the crown, but Thor’s hammer is a-comin’ down,” he rages on the opening track. The music leaps eclectically but cohesively, from ’77-punk blast to driving acoustica to dubwise groove to Celt-flavored balladry. “The Devil Down in the Water,” Turner’s Hurricane Katrina song, gets transformed into a dirge with a tolling bodhrán drum.
The album encompasses Americana from the 7 train to the Dust Bowl, contrasting Seattle’s “first ever Hooverville” with its latteand- computers image, and mourning the lonely, alcoholic death of Stephen Foster, “like a 19th-century rock star,” Turner said at a recent show in Brooklyn. It closes with a harmonica moaning like a dying prairie campfire.
Click here to preview the songs and buy the album via iTunes.
NoLandGrab: Lost? We have not yet begun to fight.
Posted by eric at November 18, 2010 11:10 AM