Albums of the Year # 35 Cafe Racer - Famous Dust

Written in August:

'Life in the hive puckered up by night...' 

I can find little trace of Chicago's Cafe Racer and their second album Famous Dust on Internet searches, though they do have a social media presence. It seems they're still something of a secret despite the tremendous qualities of their new record which I've been utterly thrilled with over the last couple of days of listening to it.

It actually came out in February but it seems it's made little more than local waves since. A great number of people are missing a trick in this case because it's a rare gem. The whole thing has that splendid wired qualities that are only too rare with independent records these days and is probably the best frenetic guitar album I've heard this year alongside The Lavender Flu's magnificent Mow The Glass which I reviewed on here a few weeks back.

While Mow The Glass is a record that draws inspiration from the Sixties particularly Famous Dust seems more obviously mired in the Punk ooze of the Seventies and Eighties. More specifically I'm minded of two bands, Television and The Jesus & Mary Chain. Television for the splendid clang and chime, the fluid intensity of the guitars, the Mary Chain for the muttered, sexually wired vocals.

It's a splendid combination, helping you imagine what might have come of things if Jim had ever teamed up with Tom and Richard. What it builds to here is a splendid, brittle intensity, a record that's truly an object of the night in the way that Marquee Moon and Psychocandy both brilliantly and definitively were back in their day. 

So the guitars wonderfully echo the spells Television cast in '77 with traces of  Venus, Guiding Light, Elevation and Friction popping up at various points in the mix, while band members Michael Santana and Adam Schubert, who also share guitar duties, trade turns at the mic recalling the likes of Some Candy Talking and Just Like Candy along the way. There are also some of the best spoken vocal contributions to a record I've heard since Dexys Searching For The Young Soul Rebels all those years ago. Altogether it's a winning formula.

All in all it's the frenetic intensity of the record that won me over. There's a real sense of a band taking risks here rather than trailing down a readily defined path which is so often the impression I get when listening to new records nowadays. Cafe Racer choose to spend the night in the woods instead and Famous Dust is all the better for it!