Kid Congo Powers, sometime-member of The Cramps, The Bad Seeds and The Gun Club, scoops up the mic with a queeny flourish and whispers, "We're the Knoxville Girls. We're from New Yoik City. We're kinda shy." His swaggering gait, his trash chic, his band's glam-trimmed garage-stomp, all suggest that he just might be lying.
Knoxville Girls are a suitably perverse jerk through rock's ear-ringing back pages. Jerry Teel, ex-Chrome Cranks, Honeymoon Killers and the spit of Neil Young at his least kempt, plays harsh rhythm guitar and rasps heartily, while Jack Martin (Little Porkchop, Blackstrap Molasses Family) picks shadowy surf-slashes, and Congo lacerates his guitar 'till it haemorrhages noise like a broken vein. Bob Bert (ex-Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore) keeps time, and a dude named Barry London (with no sleaze-CV to speak of - yet) toots the Farfisa, but it's this central three who snare you, their insouciant blare kicking black holes through your skull with elegantly-fashioned steel-tipped crocodile-skin shoes.
The songs - 'Truck Drivin' Man', 'Low Cut Apron' - are all fine-fashioned rock'n'roll, but they're only half the story. The sleaze hangs heavy in the air tonight like a fine drizzle of Victorian London soot, thanks to these masters of all that is (knowingly) sick'n'wrong in rock. The painfully stylish boy standing beside NME spits at the floor and whoops with glee, and really there's no finer recommendation than that.
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