JON SPENCER - Damage

The days are long gone, two decades now, when Jon Spencer first appeared on the US indie-rock scene with his first, pale creation, Pussy Galore. A trio of manic-depressives, they did what came most naturally to them, and were also largely ahead of their time in doing it: vomiting putrid riffs over haphazard sketches of percussive rhythms; the kind of stuff that would make today's "alternative" scene stars - like Jack White (White Stripes), who back then was practically a kid - turn pale with envy.

So Jon Spencer is back, as we were saying, and he does so with a statement of intent, namely by dropping his own name from the band's moniker, underlining the unity and absolute democracy that now reigns among its members, as he confirmed in a recent interview. The jagged edges and roughness that marked his previous work have vanished: we could call this an album conceived, in certain ways, with a sculptor's mindset, an approach geared more towards subtraction than addition, more devoted to stripping matter away than piling it on - a kind of musical syncretism in reverse.

But while this holds true for the stylistic and musical side of things, it can't be said of how the studio material was packaged and presented; this time around, the former Mr. "Hog" summoned the elite of international production to his court: Steve Jordan, Dan The Automator, David Holmes, DJ Shadow, Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, Jesus And Mary Chain, Nine Inch Nails, among others), willing - by his own admission - to invest "a ton of money" in the production, breaking for once with his rigid discipline as a "self-made producer".

His Milan tour date partly confirmed this shift in the aesthetic make-up of the new material, but the backbone, the structure - or rather the destructuring - of the songs remains subject to that same iconoclastic fury that has always hovered over every production released under the Explosion name.

"Damage", in any case, is a finely crafted record, from which certain tracks stand out above the rest: take "Crunchy", where the band apes the rawest, dirtiest side of the Dandy Warhols, or "Blowin My Mind", which feels like sitting in on a late-night session from "Electric Ladyland", where Jimi Hendrix used to pick up the first dazed passersby outside the studio and invite them up to raise a little hell.

"Burn It Off" springs from the unease of living in the United States today, but also, more broadly, from the anger and frustration over events beyond our control. "Mars, Arizona" sounds damn Stones-like, with that artless 4/4 stomp that nonetheless gives it an aura of brilliant simplicity that only a master like the Akron rocker can pull off without tipping into banality.

From his home behind bars, the thoroughly jammed "sex machine" James Brown claims paternity of that sickly, punk-streaked funk that goes by the name of "Fed Up And Low Down", while "Rattling" lands somewhere near "Graceland" territory, conjuring a late-period Elvis, bloated and dazed from a lethal mix of booze and drugs, clumsily rolling around on a sonic carpet woven from exquisitely "Setzer-esque" fabrics.

Once again Mr. Spencer has pulled it off, but malicious voices from the usual suspects on the American indie music circuit want us to believe that the former Boss Hog frontman has run dry creatively and is irreversibly headed for decline. But, as we know, there's something damnably perverse built into human nature... Just as old Gavin Friday used to say, "Each man kills the thing he loves".

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24/11/2006