This LP you’re gonna sink into like a warm bath on a winter’s day… This is one sexy album. In a way, it’s got ‘make-out disk’ pencilled all over it…“Memory Deluxe”: A clear, rich organ-laden tapestry wraps its arms around us. Gluck, a perfectionist of some note, has spent time and consideration on these lyrics.
Still tinged with country, yet miles from AM C&W, we’re touched from the start. The son of legendary Kevin Coyne, Robert has joined with Gluck at the hip to produce an lp of beauty, intelligence and grace. You’ll be playing it over and over, just to try to crack the code …
Pulsing, eerie, dominant, When Will Runs Out should be played in supermarkets and lifts. Insidious, reflective, hypnotic. Similar in themes to the original "Buffalo Bill", but if anything the future for our gunslinger is bleaker, more modern. I guess the gunslinger wears a suit nowadays, and inhabits posh bars looking for upmarket tarts.
“I Don't Need To Know” is a cracking, humming, squeaking doorstopper of a song. This salesman won’t quit until he’s inside the door with one hand down your pants and another somewhere rather rude. Damn good this…
With a brisk nod to the Stooges song of (almost) the same name, “We Will Fall Hard” takes the basic idea and takes us into some lush baked sand romance … lush? Gawd, it’s a positively gin-soaked tragic romance…
Such a gorgeous song, "Nowhere" has entwining folk tunes capturing despair, and with Gluck’s whispering, wishing voice over … so romantic … ‘you can hold my hands, I got no arms…’
The next song, “Evelyn”, positively swaggers grief, and who’d have heard of such a thing? Fabulous. Haven’t stopped waltzing around the room with a bottle and the cat. It’s on repeat.
“Old Father Death”, full of silent storms, like Ry Cooder and Neil Young hovering in the studio… so sexy, these songs about death… ‘nothing left to give, when I meet Old Father Death…’
Strange how Gluck’s lovely romantic ballads hide the most powerful ideas. Gluck’s half-whispered voice gets right inside you…
“The Extra Mile” just has to be a single if only because it keeps you dancing, singing along. Too many songs here demand to be played again and again. You can imagine the clip for this, slightly more than the others, and you can imagine it being covered by Johnny Cash or Marc Almond or Nick Cave… jeez, this is sexy… talk about intimate…
“Blood”: But here’s another single… I don’t want the CD to end, ever … like the pulse of traffic on a sultry day, we lie back and Gluck confesses his innermost… and then there’s this Chuck Berryesque riff crash-landing smack in the middle and … perfect. Where’s the tequila?
By the time we reach “Killer” we’re well into the meat of the matter … the gunslingin’ stockbroker in the modern world … sweeps us away in a hail of bullets and paper tickets …
And if “Rainshowers” isn’t postcoital, I’ve never heard postcoital. Beautiful warm fuzzy. Really, the organ here is hymnal, and as we reach for the sadly nearly empty tequila again, Late And Lonely raises it’s head, a little like the first LP, guitar structures twanging like wire around a cactus, reflectively she done left me … defiant with all the arrogance of someone who doesn’t know how little they know…
Coyne is a formidable solo artist in his own right with quite a reputation in Germany, who also played everything on the new album except drums. In many ways he is the main force behind the new album, his music complementing Jeremy's vocals perfectly.
So, falling full circle as Gluck and Coyne venture back towards the first Buffalo Bill set, “Episode In A Town” makes the comparison between the stockbroker and the gunslinger, the middle man and the cowboy, the romantic savage and the savage romantic…
“Episode in a Town” (Gluck/Sudden/Howard) has that drifting pulse closer to reggae than country, and suddenly we realise, Gluck has done it again, reinvented or reinterpreted a way of expression. Very much its own genre, like some of John Cale’s CDs or Nico’s (to take two examples), these two Buffalo Bills deserve more than an excited review, but your eyes and ears.
It fills the room with a sensibility you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll dance, cry and probably hit the bottle if you don’t find yourself naked with someone in a corner wondering how you got all those carpet burns …
Instead of attempting to recreate a past glory (“I Knew Buffalo Bill” from 1987), Gluck has returned to the core themes here; if they’re less obvious than Rowland S Howard’s fantastic guitar on the original, it’s all replaced by a steady, building series of ideas and songs which culminate in … well. That’s for you to discover.
