From the same ’96 sessions that produced Dowd’s startling debut Wrong Side Of Memphis, these four-track recordings are the overspill. You’ll find (slightly) more sanitised versions of some on Pictures From Life’s Other Side (1999) and last year’s The Pawnbroker’s Wife, but these?in JD speak?are “the original bad seeds”. It’s mostly slow-stealth swamp blues, rendered fearsome and moving by his scowling delivery, sounding forever snagged on a barbed wire fence. The additional vocals of (regular staple) Kim Sherwood-Caso add to the wracked creepiness of the title track, while on “Rolling And Tumbling Trilogy” Dowd comes on like the bastard spawn of Aleister Crowley.
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