“We got the vaccine so the disease cannot shake me Lord… so step aside and let the audience just sing along …”
Josh Scogin’s songs are so dense, Biblical and mythic – mythic like great rock ’n’ roll – that the words quoted above, from album opener The Knife, The Knife, The Knife, can seem as timeless as they do topical.
Scogin (formerly of metalcore outfit The Chariot) delivers guitar, vocals, shamanic wailing and hollering while Nikko Yamada takes drumming duties for the duo’s third full-length release.
This Atlanta blues-punk pairing can strut and rock like the best of ’em and certainly make some racket. It’s not just about the voice, guitar and drums as there are also strategic, swirly keyboards, distortion and other sound effects. Who are your favourite two-piece? Black Keys? White Stripes? Kills? Carpenters? Nick Cave and Warren Ellis? Make room, if you haven’t already, for ’68. “Celebrate … some fires can’t be unlit” (from Bad Bite).
The playing is energised, energising and expert and it all sounds terrific – production is by Nick Raskulinecz (Foos, Rush) and, while some will no doubt still prefer rawer debut album In Humor And Sadness and/ or 2017’s equally excellent Two Parts Viper, there seems to be a tad more shape and structure to what’s going on here. Track one is the aforementioned The Knife, The Knife, The Knife while track 10, the closer, is The Storm, The Storm, The Storm. Four is What You Feed and five is What You Starve (Yamada shines on those two particularly, but stars throughout, sometimes with a jazzy influence). Six has another three-part title, The Silence, The Silence, The Silence. But if there is shape and structure there is certainly enough madness and mayhem for aficionados to take to their enclaves, braves and raves – and it almost goes without saying it should all work superbly live (“… so step aside and let the audience …”).
Repeated listenings invite, introduce and reveal additional delights. Life And Debt is a stand-out, Scogin’s vocals as passionate and committed as ever but also vulnerable: “Is this the setting sun or a changing of the guard?/ Should I give up my hands?/ Should I give up myself?/ ’Tis a labour of love/ … Another day goes by/ Another 100 years, but I can’t not try.”
Other highlights include the sparse, staccato and effects-heavy Lovers In Death and the Nick Cave-y Nervous Passenger (reworked a bit since recent EP Love Is Ain’t Dead) with dramatic vocal whooping and the toll of the bell. Closing epic The Storm, The Storm, The Storm recalls a hungover Spaghetti Western fever dream before rolling moodily and doomily like Ahab on the hunt for his leviathan nemesis. Classic stuff.
Give One Take One by ’68 is out now on Cooking Vinyl