HEROINE SHEIKS - Out of Aferica LP

Highly recommended.

First time on vinyl.

Out of Aferica and passing once again through the Reptilian immigration department. Shannon Selberg’s entirely reconfigured, revamped Heroine Sheiks have lab tested 11 factory fresh, fully assembled, tuned and torqued songs – not ideas for songs, not experimental keyboard games – but nothing shy of his finest body of work since the Cows seminal Sexy Pee Story, if not better.

Shannon’s vaudevillian creep show has never been this well utilized, showing the amount of restraint and excess at the right times in exploring his menagerie of hard luck characters. Age and musical maturity have chiseled away the unnecessary parts of the persona, gone is the drawn-on mustache of shock and in its place the true five o’clock shadow of the narrative mindfuck.

The album begins with the subdued darkness of “Stabbed by an Angel” into the Flipper and Fang brain-screw of “Cock Asia”, setting the tone for much of the record – heavy-handed guitar work, perfectly placed bugle and keyboard flourishes, and Shannon’s slippery, alley-cat vocals.

The upbeat “Break Up” introduces a three person (but just one Shannon) conversation of weird-ass romantic problems, “Brooklyntown Romeo” unfolds with another raw storyline. “Jaws of Life” is as dank as anything from the first Unsane record.

“The Obscenery” is Shannon channeling mid-70’s Lou Reed quite well, singing – yep, singing – over a slowly unfolding piano line. Selberg rarely gets the lyrical credit he deserves, with each song unpeeling like a cracked-up, narrative orange peel of seedy life. The kinda folks you meet late at night in poorly lit, smoky rooms, the kind of places Selberg’s spent the last twenty years, unrepentantly.