MUMMY SHORT ARMS-Cigarette Smuggling CD Single
t's got the sharp-minded madness of Kevin Coyne, it's got the smoky haze of Tom Waits, it's got the swagger of Johnny Guitar Watson, a touch of the humour of Frank Zappa and the somewhere in there lurks a mix of Captain Beefheart and Bruce Springsteen – in short, it's a mind-blowing combination of approaches, passions and creativity wrapped up in the most unique musical voice that's been witnessed in a long, long time. The main track is almost drawled in a hazy, almost out-of-mind, drunken barroom urgency, set against an almost out of tune harmonica, the whiplash of electronic percussion, the rumble of real drums, and the rolling wordless chorus of a keyboard-as-backing-vocals, the vocal becoming ever more frazzled as the track drives on, the sharpness contrasted with a distant undercurrent of strings that softens the blow a little. All in all, one remarkable gem of a track. The second track, “Searching For A Body”, adds guitar, what sounds like a steel drum and lurches along with intent, this time the whole thing more intense, louder, the vocal on the edge of sanity as the backing sounds like a caribbean party glued on to the wildest bursts of Velvet Underground, and this amorphous blur of an arrangement catapults onto your senses with snarling intent, taut, on the edge and decidedly careering towards the cliff at a rate of knots – but it's fantastic as you are the rabbit in the headlights and there's no going back.