Like some opiate vision of New York punk existence in its purest form, arising, fully realised from the pages of a book of Jim Carroll's poems, here are Beechwood and their first album Songs From the Land of Nod just in time to assure us that perhaps 2018 is not going to be so bad at all musically after all.
Beechwood speak fluent, downtown Manhattan of the distinctly seventies variety and why on earth shouldn't they? According to the legend of their formation the band have spent time in the last few years living on the streets and have flirted with life outside the law as petty thieves, runaways and hustlers as a means of first getting things together and latterly their band going. Patti Smith's Jean Genet fantasies made flesh.
This is the life they've lived apparently and the one they speak of here. They do it all, you instantly realise, very well indeed. Songs From the Land of Nod is a haunted record, but one of no mean achievement, oozing with edgy cut-throat energy and cool, sleazy grace. The kind of record rarely heard since the prime of The Ramones and The Cramps, it truly doesn't put a foot wrong. You feel like you're in the backroom of CBGB's in late '75 watching Jerry Nolan and Richard Hell swapping banter over a game of pool while Dee Dee passes time on the pinball machine before The Ramones are due to play.
All these references to New York's earthy past might seem rather redundant but in Songs From the Land of Nod's case they're utterly appropriate. I haven't heard a record that revivifies the ghost of that decade in the city so authentically for years. The Strokes records, great as they were, never quite did that wherever else they took you. Beechwood evidently understand the seedy underbelly, and here they let all that crazy ardour breathe again. Ten wonderful songs, nine band originals plus an inspired cover of The Kinks I'm Not Like Everyone Else. The carefree looseness of it all, the fact that something somehow seems unrealised, that the production is almost deliberately sloppy, makes it all seem just too good to be true. The whole point of this stuff was to understand where it all came from so well and have a feel for doing it yourself that you could somehow pull it off without even seeming to care. The Heartbreakers knew that. So did The Voidoids. So did The Dead Boys. And so remarkably in 2018, do Beechwood. Hear the record!
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