CELEBRITY HANDSHAKE "That's Showbiz, Baby" 7inch


"This makes the Oblivians sounds like Rush!"

I'm positive I've blurted that out more than a few occasions through the years but one time I know for sure that I did was the first time a record from Portland, Maine's Jumpin' Beans and the Moustaches was rotating on my turntable.

It wasn't just a random blurt either. To use the term "blown out" about it was an understatement. The dry rotted garage punk irascibility and raw, drunken hollerin' that it discharged made what it was being compared to sound downright elegant.

If a compatriot with more "serious" taste in music was ever at my digs and started calling what I was listening to as being inept or dimwitted I would say "Oh, yeah. You think?" Then I would put on a Jumpin' Beans record. It would make them head straight for the door.

Maladroit minds that mastered those fracases have much to do with what is going on with Celebrity Handshake.

To call the rubbed raw guitar sound that anchors "That's Showbiz, Baby" a boogie riff would be misleading. A boogie barf perhaps is fitting. It's sick, it's smells, it oozes and it gonna leave a big stain behind. The beats behind does all it can to keep up and be heard while voice possessed by the Lord, the Devil, Howlin' Wolf and the fine art of swallowing razor blades serves up a verbal lashing that leaves everything mutilated.



On  "Television Lips" it like they've spaced from a moldy basement by stowing away on a rusted rocketship. One could describe the clatter of this of the slab "space punk" and bandy around the names of legends such as Chrome but Celebrity Handshake seem more inclined to use dirt from Brewers Phillips as an inspiration for a hook than crediting it all to a trip to Morrocco.

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