Ah, the curious case of post-Days Of Wine And Roses Dream Syndicate. The Los Angeles quartet's 1982 full-length debut was a stunning opus of crazed guitar shrapnel, phenomenally intuitive ensemble playing, and singer Steve Wynn's wiser-than-his-years songwriting. Like Husker Du's Zen Arcade, Days Of Wine And Roses not only sent shockwaves through the American underground in the early 1980s, but its reverberations are still felt among discerning new bands.
Its grandeur should have propelled them into the stratosphere, but, preoccupied by image, the MTV-fed public went for Kajagoogoo instead. Two albums later, scarred by the departure of original guitarist Karl Precoda and bassist Kendra Smith, not to mention a trip through the major-label meat grinder, the Syndicate was a different animal.
Ghost Stories, with Neil Young producer Elliott Mazer at the helm, is the band's 1988 studio swan song, a dense, desperate clang of a record occupying the psychic space that comes right before a nervous breakdown. With Paul Cutler supplying the brutal, sometimes atonal guitar assault, Wynn delivers coruscating songs of emotional desolation, broken up by stray rays of hope (like "Whatever You Please"). A rampaging cover of Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and Wynn's mood-setter "The Side I'll Never Show" are emblematic yet defiant finales to the Syndicate story. (This sparkling remaster appends eight live-on-radio bonus cuts, including a manic cover of Rodney Crowell's "Ain't Living Long Like This".)
Picking up on the unhinged aspect of Ghost Stories, 1989's The Complete Live At Raji's measures up to such behemoths as Young's Live Rust or Warren Zevon's Stand In The Fire for pure, onstage feral intensity. Cutler's jagged, eight-legged leads drive Wynn's songs in strangely tangled, deranged directions, turning them all into psycho guitar freakouts of the first order. From the insistent riff that curls around your brain in "Still Holding On To You" to "John Coltrane Stereo Blues", which closes the set in a barrage of white noise, Raji's is the Syndicate's Television-meets-the-Velvet Underground sound pushed as far as it would go. It was also the end of an era.
Comments ()