Description

High priestess of macabre rock and assaultive poetics with impeccable taste in collaborators, Lydia Lunch first joined forces with guitarist and songwriter Rowland S. Howard in the early 80s in Europe. The duo improvised clamorous live séances as an opening act before Howards sets with the revered Australian post-punk act The Birthday Party.

The fortuitous meeting spawned 1982s Some Velvet Morning EP, and Howard guested on Lunchs excellent 1987 album, Honeymoon in Red, but the pairs next true collaboration took until 1991, when they travelled to Memphis to create Shotgun Wedding with producer JG Thirlwell (Foetus, Coil).

As Lunch wrote in the liner notes for an earlier CD edition, Shotgun Wedding is a sassy scrapbook of bruised love songs, somehow buoyant in spite of its obsession with death. Indeed, the guests at this wedding are ghastly phantoms and shifty junkies, but the chemistry between Lunch and Howard produces deviant bliss, and Shotgun Wedding showcases each artist equally. Lunch dominates vocal duties, but Howards oaken backups propel the rollicking Endless Fall to a feverish and resplendent musical climax. Elsewhere, his teardrop guitar leads and penetrating sustain create a menacing atmosphere on What Is Memory for Lunchs trenchant speech to ride atop. A cover of Alice Coopers Black Juju closes out the original albumits sinister brooding and fiery outbursts the perfect cap to an album of mad incantations and tarnished eroswhile this reissue ends with the cover of Lee Hazlewoods classic Some Velvet Morning.