All The Saints
Fire on Corridor X
Touch & Go
By Jose Fritz
If you don’t know who All the Saints are, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. I am hereby revoking your indie-trendy scenester membership card. You will be evicted from the borough of Brooklyn and forced to relocate to Weehawken, New Jersey. You will not be permitted to wear tight pants in the whole of New York. Your family will never survive the shame. Better to pretend you know what I’m talking about and follow along nodding your head at the proper junctures.
When Hemingway died, Hunter S. Thompson went to Montana and stole the elk horns from above the front door of the senior author’s cabin in Ketchum, Idaho. It was a chalice and a symbol and he seized it in the night and carried it forward like a truncheon. All the Saints have stolen the horns of BRMC, who in turn had taken it from Jesus and Mary Chain, who themselves had usurped The Gun Club. Each time the music expanded its oeuvre like it was alive; all throughout it is overwhelming and epic.
There are moments in the record that appear to be all sounds to all people at once, distorted, impossibly dense, sounding of the tubes buzzing, and the amplifier rattling. The word “drone” does these dramatic crescendos an injustice in its understatement. These Alabama transplants have stumbled onto a sound, something more immortal than any one of us.
Every song just becomes the shattering of exposed limbs, the bitterness of ash and the meandering hallucinations of what started out as a single idea. It just looms hugely over every attempt to describe it. It’s psychedelic yes, it’s drone yes, but to say that every roar of delay and reverb following every chord is drone is also true. There is a song in very measure.
I don’t want to drive home the idea of every song as loud and bombastic. In the scale of things it becomes easy to forget their self-control and nuance. Tracks like “Hornett” are spare, dark and lingering, but “Sheffield” rocks the arena rock like Zeppelin did in 1975. They are destined for huge rooms with looming restored Victorian arches ceilings with lovingly ignored original lead paint. When you encounter a record this great you can’t help but to feel that you are being judged and derided for what you were listening to previously. Try not to feel bad about it, some of your friends are moving to Weehawken too.
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