Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Someone once wrote that a Flaming Lips concert is like a cake. And not just any cake, mind you: an over-the-top, calorie-bomb affair with lavish fillings, garish reinforcements and candy-icing flourishes, an excessive, hyperbolic swirl of cream in loud clashing colours piled up in a multi-tiered binge. And this feast, let's be clear, is always unfailingly identical to itself, candles and packaging included. The beauty of it, that someone always said, is that beyond the confectioners' excesses, when a slice ends up in front of you, you always end up enjoying it. Making all due allowances and drawing the necessary distinctions, we could say the skeleton of this metaphor also works for any show by Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion. Minus the sugary stucco and the improbable colour schemes, of course — more like a cocoa cake wrapped in the classic armour of extra-dark chocolate. Unmistakable in its formula, honed down to the last cliché, a must whenever one of its slices comes within reach of a devoted rocker. Sure, the flavour is intense, very strong, and by necessity it won't be to everyone's taste. But those who love the genre tend never to deny themselves the truly liberating gratification of a second helping.

That — no more, no less — was our intent when we chose, without much hesitation, not to miss yet another appointment with Spencer and his acolytes. It may well be a show whose script is known down to the most insignificant detail, yet that brazen face alone, staring out from a promo photo, is an irresistible lure. It works. It already works when that face is paired with Matt Verta-Ray's for the (fun) rockabilly variant that is Heavy Trash. It works even better when, instead of the guitarist's herculean country-boy jaw, we get the far more enticing replacement of Mrs. Spencer herself, the enchanting panther Christina Martinez, putting us squarely in raw-'90s-rock territory with Boss Hog. And of course — how could it be otherwise — it bears its finest fruit when flanked on either side by the lovably punchable faces of his longtime cohorts: the ornery Russell Simins and the angel-faced Judah Bauer. Almost a modern messiah of noise, flanked by two handsome henchmen-turned-thieves redeemed through their rock'n'roll apostolate. Masks that must have struck a deal with the devil to stay so well preserved — an electric Cerberus that, for its devoted admirers, will always simply be JSBX.

The cult surrounding the New York trio survives untouched by the passing of time. The tacit agreement between band and fans thrives on the shared illusion of a benevolent freeze-frame, an eternal replay of 1994 stretched on indefinitely with everyone's blessing. That's why this trio of scoundrels, with their alchemical formula — which has by now outlived more imitation attempts than La Settimana Enigmistica has puzzles — tours the world with startling regularity and always comes back right on schedule to feed its own sacred live flame everywhere it goes, as if fearing its followers might fall out of love. And the followers remain numerous and motivated at every stop, always a little older but occasionally joined by fresh-faced, enthusiastic new recruits. A good sign. For its part, the Blues Explosion lives off wall-to-wall confirmation even when, as with this latest tour, there's the novelty of a brand-new album of songs to be christened live. It's the first time this has happened in the last eight years, but that detail is beside the point. “Meat and Bone” hasn't betrayed the orthodoxy of the raw, full-blooded sound that's the house specialty, conforming quite profitably to the canons that, in the group's golden years, made them an extraordinary powder keg of styles and influences. The live setting, as always in their case, helps sand down the few remaining scraps of inventiveness and energy compared to the jewels of their back catalogue, smashing them all together in the same bubbling cauldron and dousing the whole thing with the inevitable hefty dose of unfiltered, no-quarter-given hysteria.

But JSBX is also a mark of quality in the choice of its occasional support acts. On one of their previous Italian dates, it was thanks to Spencer that we discovered a sensational Finnish all-female garage outfit, The Micragirls, who left quite an impression on this writer, between blistering rides and exemplary, stomping vitality. This time was no worse, with the opening slot entrusted to The Mentalettes, a numerous and unusual outfit halfway between a classic girl group and an energetic beat band, all coordinates and sonic stereotypes lodged firmly in the early sixties, with a full seven wild members onstage, including three sassy (and extremely leggy) singers. A fine mix of genres, much like the headliners, but also of nationalities, given the varied backgrounds (Germany, Sweden and Spain) of its enthusiastic members, who tore up the wide stage of Turin's Molodiciotto for a good three-quarters of an hour — long enough to make for a tasty appetizer, and just long enough to ward off any boredom during the wait. The changeover for the main event turned out to be the usual, quick walk-through, letting us watch the three Americans at work in their embryonic but already telling pre-show ritual: Judah nibbling away at his Telecaster (clean-shaven and looking a lot more youthful than a couple of years ago, when he was sporting an aging-cowboy look), a thorough check of the drum kit from the monumental Russell, and a crowd-pleasing cameo from the head of the firm himself in his regulation outfit: black leather flared trousers, shirt and waistcoat. First ovation.

Then the lights went down in the room and off we went with the same unchanged script as every other occasion, plus the indescribable pleasure of finding ourselves there again, extras in the cast of a film as rowdy as it is delirious, a tribute to over half a century of rock restlessness. Childlike in our excitement, screaming and thrusting our arms out at every twitch of the histrionic frontman on the edge of the stage, who leaned out over the crowd like a perfect stage animal, striking plastic poses tailor-made for the flashes of cameras and smartphones. Jon, ever timeless. "A kind of vampire feeding on the very vitality of his own music, be it hybridized blues, unruly rock or any other noisy offshoot — post, hardcore, garage, noise, punk — pick your own label, they're all plausible. Not an ounce less commitment, not a decibel less than the other times we'd crossed paths with him. Proof? By the third song alone, the frontman was already drenched in an impressive amount of sweat and, if anything, kept revving his engine higher as the set went on. Simins never seemed any less on fire. No need to point out that without the magnetic primitivism of his reactor-drumming, Jon Spencer's outfit would produce a tenth of its atomic energy. And it's superfluous to reiterate that without Bauer's guitar — sharp and elegant at once — the word Blues would have to be struck from the New Yorkers' name altogether." Forgive the indulgence of quoting ourselves from reports filed elsewhere, some time ago. As said, it's always the same cake we're describing here.

And once again we're missing the setlist to append to this piece. We're missing it because it doesn't exist, and perhaps it never has. From the opening riff to the trailing agonized feedback at the tail end of the last encore, it's one single, unbroken sequence of electric exorcisms and tumultuous rhythmic upheavals — a hundred-plus minutes of magma that swept up and absorbed a good chunk of “Meat and Bone”, presenting it to us as a rosary of appendices virtually indistinguishable from everything else, historic refrains, funk fractures, theremin cameos and covers of James Brown or the Beastie Boys included. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion concerts have this peculiarity: a single song that unwinds monstrously across frenetic, incendiary sets, without a single moment to catch your breath, shaped by instinct and by the overwhelming power of improvisation, hurled forward like a car out of control toward an ending of hallucinatory spasms: the “Wail”s and the “Afro”s, the “Dang”s and the “High Gear”s, flashes barely recognizable within the torrential flow of a band that's truly unique in the world, more charged than any other when performing in its natural habitat. Snippets of “Extra Width” and “Acme”, a bit of “Now I Got To Worry” and a whole lot, an awful lot, of “Orange”, set against an almost total oblivion for that pair of albums released under the Blues Explosion name alone. A loud and clear message about how “Plastic Fang” and “Damage” ought to be regarded today: disowned offspring of the American group's least authentic era. A long stretch of time that “Meat and Bone” brought to a close, in the wake of a rediscovered euphoria. Beyond his face and his heart, Jon lost his own name in the process. Perhaps little more than a footnote, or maybe the missing ingredient that this cake needed to become truly special again, even without any revolution in flavour. They served us another slice, and we couldn't possibly turn it down.

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