Axemen – Three Virgins Three Versions Three Visions 2xLP (Siltbreeze) / “Nutsack” b/w “Nut Shack Redemption Song” 7” (Negative Guest List)
RECOMMENDED
Three Virgins surfaced in 1986, the first studio double LP (minding the Fall’s In a Hole, technically a bootleg) to be released by the Flying Nun label of ChCh, NZ, and passed around as a well-kept secret until about the early ‘90s, when the last copies went out of circulation. It’s a little known landmark of free/wild punk-folk-art splatter, a towering achievement that sobers and besots all at once, the collective protest of a then-young Stevie McCabe, Stu Kowalski and Bob Brannigan using your entire being like some sort of metaphysical dialysis machine. Expect to find bits and pieces of their leftover materials lodged inside your psyche’s sieve immediately after diving into this 88-minute morass of four-track freedom, the collective expunging of the artists’ conscience through fuzz pedals, manhandled acoustic strum, broken gear, barking mad displays of showmanship, and the rambunctious zeal required to produce a monster in any medium. Not much comes close, but you, as others have, can draw a line to this and a double album one level of abstraction removed (Twin Infinitives), as well as one overtly defined and weeded out (The Pod) a handful of years later. It’s hard to get your arms around Three Virgins enough to summarize, but it’s the kind of record that’ll leave you feeling delirious, like you just woke up from being passed out at your desk, papers stuck to your face, disoriented and off your kilter. It’s also all for the best, because never again would freedom and ideas, within such a jagged framework, one that finds a bond between corrosion and glee, coexist so righteously across two pieces of vinyl.
Maybe it was the Siltbreeze reissue series, of which Three Virgins is the third and possibly final edition, that triggered the Axemen back into commission. The wizard(s) at Negative Guest List have stepped in to support the band’s recent/did-it-already-happen Australian tour with a two-song 7” par excellence. “Nutsack” and “Nut Shack” are in ways nothing more than exercises to see how many times they can insert the titular word into these songs. Recorded at WFMU on their 2009 American tour, there are more overt attempts at melody here, but the same shambles that powered Three Virgins never went away, and blesses these two tracks with a demented, grinning glee that evaporates once the songs generate their own steam, and you’re left singing “nutsack” to total strangers at inopportune times. You’ll notice I didn’t try to describe what these songs are like any further. What’s the point? They rule. Lawyer up! (http://www.siltbreeze.com) (http://negativeguestlist.blogspot.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
