Monday 20 May 2019

The Silent Majority - Life Sex & Death

Provenance: A recommendation from the good people who, like myself, spend far too much time picking arguments with each other over the dumbest shit imaginable; music message board posters.

Review: Prior to reading the forum thread about 'great lost records' or similar, I'd never heard of Life Sex & Death. Yet the few posters who spoke up for The Silent Majority were so convincing, bordering almost on reverence, that I simply couldn't resist taking the plunge. I snapped up a copy without listening to a single second of music.

Why? Well, one member of the forum recalled them delivering one of the most scintillating live performances he'd been privileged to witness - and had begun the evening watching frontman Stanley jerking off in the gutter outside the venue. Another testified that he saw Stanley emerging from a dumpster and eating a discarded, half-eaten burrito. And we're not talking about a band on their uppers - this was at the height of the hype.

LSD were and remain a strange proposition - three hair-metal dudes fronted by a homeless guy who smelled like shit and affected psychotic breakdowns in the midst of live shows and interviews. Even if Stanley, aka Chris Stann, wasn't a street guy to begin with (rumours abound that he came from a wealthy background), he took method acting to its furthest reaches. Contemporary accounts suggest he really did wear dirty, ripped clothes, ate food from bins and slept rough.

What a tragedy, then, if this turned out to be some collection of fin-de-siecle butt-rock, or a gloomy alternative metal album about doing heroin and feeling a bit upset. The reality is that The Silent Majority is both of these things, neither of these things, and a whole lot more. It's a daring move to open your album with a live rendition of a torch song called 'Blue Velvet Moon' played on an out-of-tune ukulele; positively stupid, maybe. This rather inauspicious start is brought to a sudden conclusion, a thunderous drum fill kicking off the second part of the track - 'We're Here Now' - a real heads-down, diesel-powered statement of intent.

This approach rather sets the mood for the rest of the album; every time you think you've got a hang of LSD, they undermine what has come before; sometimes with black humour, often with horror, but always with interesting ideas. Track two is the jackboot-stomp of 'Jawohl Asshole'; track three is single 'School's For Fools', with a pop-punk sensibility that apes Twisted Sister's bubblegum anti-authority capers. Then we have 'Telephone Call', probably the best song that Soundgarden never recorded. It's an uncanny, elliptical number that, once it stutters into life, could be about a few topics, child abuse being chief amongst the candidates in this writer's humble opinion - and it rocks hard. The first time I heard the peculiar way that Stanley enunciates the line "you've got - a gun - I can't - outrun - I'm still that little boy, haunted by thoughts in the middle of the night" made me skip back to the start of the song the instant it finished. Bewildering, but brilliant.

Over the course of the album LSD touch upon a huge range of genres - including psychedelic blues, heavy metal, country ('Farm Song' is yet another unexpected twist), glam metal, grunge - and don't really make a misstep. As an hour-long survey of a transitional time for rock music at the dawning of the 1990s it's pretty comprehensive and superbly well-executed. A chorus can be so sweet, and hooky, complete with soaring harmonies, that one could be forgiven for thinking they were listening to Bon Jovi were the song not called 'Fucking Shit Ass'. LSD had the chops to pull of the extraordinarily heavy ('Train', 'Tank'), rousing ('Raise a Little Hell') and stomach-churning ('Guatemala') within the span of about twenty minutes without sounding disjointed. Stanley's voice plays a big part; beseeching, growling, yelping, lascivious, bleating and ever so slightly lisping, always embodying whatever emotion or thought he's trying to convey.

So, you're into the home straight, you've just got through the pummelling 'Big Black Bush', which sounds like Slave to the Grind era Skid Row and features a fun gimmick where the studio recording gives way to live sound midway through, Stanley leading the crowd in chanting the title of the song back to him. Damn me, then, if the last song on The Silent Majority isn't one of the most beautiful and tender piano ballads ever written. 'Rise Above', a delicate discourse on heartbreak, could and would sound like unbearable schmaltz in the hands of another. Here, in context, it sounds like the becalmed centre of the storm raging in its creator's brain. In its own way its utterly shocking. What a neat way to wrap it all up, eh?

Do whatever you need to get hold of a copy - The Silent Majority is the real deal.

2 comments:

  1. Amazing ! You’ve included LS&D here ! This is the most undiscovered band of the 1990s . They would have been a giant worldwide group if they had kept going with just an additional recording album . You have truly outdone yourself here mate . Five Stars to You and the band .

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    1. Patty, thank you for commenting! I think they had a shot of being a big group, but in a way I'm glad that we only have this strange, wonderful album as testament to their abilities. You know, they never had time to make mistakes or become out-of-touch. Perhaps I'm being a bit romantic here - after all, I'm sure LSD would've enjoyed success, and longevity would've meant that I had a shot of seeing them live (I was 5 when this came out) - but Silent Majority meant their star burned brightly but briefly, which is more than most of us achieve.

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