Yo! I Killed Your God

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Or perhaps, "My Guitar Wants To Kill Your God". The mighty Marc Ribot proves yet again how capable he is, playing with verve, wit, grace and style across a rich diversity of genres. For once not caught spray-painting the guitar accompaniment to some of the greatest albums of the last 20 years, for Tom Waits, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, and the Lounge Lizards amongst others, this is Ribot's band Shrek, recorded thunderously live over their apparent lifespan of 1992-94, or "from Jewish Punk Revolutionary to Dance Club Burnout in eighteen short months" as the liner notes have it! At times reminiscent of the great punk-jazz-rock-rap combo Universal Congress Of (check the the title track for instance), these are fantastic performances, though it's Ribot's individual style and musical direction that remains in the memory - his uniquely clanging, harsh tones and oblique, cynical vocals, and angular melodic sense are played out all over the record. As for individual tracks, 'The Wind Cries Mary' is ostensibly a Hendrix cover of course, though it bears little relation to the original, retaining only Ribot's sardonic vocal repetition of the title. Again the lopsided funk of ... Congress Of springs to mind - there's a insanely overdriven solo by co-guitarist Chris Wood, followed by Ribot's instrumental retorts, and vocal refrain. He seems to leave the wind crying "Arto?" rather than Mary (Ribot's collaborator in the house?), before informing the appreciative crowd that he'd just fried his fourth amplifier of the month. More applause for this too, of course, before the band take on 'Softly As In A Morning Sunrise', a trademark Ribot 'latin' number, recalling his work on the untouchable 'Rain Dogs', and of course his Los Cubanos Postizos (Prosthetic Cubans) band. It's hard to describe how Ribot plays Cuban music - he's somehow simultaneously reverent and iconoclastic. Whatever. It's truly beautiful, exciting, invigorating stuff, echoed later with 'Jamon Con Yuca'. I'd love to hear Ribot vs. Eliades Ochoa, or Ibrahim Ferrer (with or without Ry Cooder). The players featured here appear in different configurations from performances in New York's CBGB, Zurich, Tokyo and Nagoya (for the record: Sebastian Steinberg, Dougie Bowne, Jim Pugliese, Roger Kleier, JD Foster, Christine Bard and Wood). Whilst Ribot reminds me of Marc Ducret in his delicately lovely, finger-picked and hammered-on licks opening 'Requiem For What's His Name', decrying his "junkyard guitarist" roots, much of this album's about the glorious noise-generating device that the electric guitar is. It's eye-poppingly noisy at times, Ribot and his fellow guitarist's interplay often sounding like two jabbering New Yorkers, shouting at each other on the phone. And, as the album explodes to a near-apocalyptic finale, there's the bonus of the "twisted pop" studio mix of 'Mon Petit Punk', Mark Anthony Thompson's dub-heavy bassline and Francois Lardeau's heavy-duty drum programming, accompanying Ribot's Badamalenti-eqsue octave guitar riff, blues stylings, and laconic voiceover. Reform this band now!