Good Morning Blues – Roy and the Devil’s Motorcycle The label calls Roy and the Devil’s Motorcycle “notorious psychedelic punk” but you might come up with a descriptor of your own. The band are unabashed fans of Spacemen 3 and you can draw a direct line back to the warped sounds of the UK underground sound circa 1969, typified by The Deviants.
“Candy Train” is an elongated sprawl of distorted guitars and barely discernible distant vocals that collapses in a pile of backward masking and sirens. “Lay in the Sun” is a Fuggs cover (how many ‘90s bands can you name that covered the Fuggs? Answer: none) that apes that the shambolic sound we thought they’d patented.
At one stage you can the sound being peppered by conga drums and sax as a passage of music melts and oozes towards its finish. Just when you pigeonhole Roy and the Devil’s Motorcycle as Sun Ra’s six-stringed cousins, they wheel out an old blues cover, “Trying to get to You”, pared back and struggling for air among a cacophony of taped seashore noises.
Is “Intro” the second-to-last “song”? By now it’s a blur with each cut blurring into the next. It sounds like it was recorded at extreme in-the-red level into a telephone and taped at the other end. Which it apparently was. “Six Feet off the Ground” sounds like it's trying to tip somneone over the edge and send them to rehab.
Is this perverse listening pleasure or nails-on-a-blackboard indulgence? “Good Morning Blues” swings from one to the other. Consider playing it at 4am when you’re desperate to get the last guests to leave.
