Lux Interior of The Cramps liked to set a scene: ‘If you’d like to see beautiful girls driving fast sports cars and breaking jocular type he-man men’s spines.’
He then left the invitation open and incomplete, before immediately segueing into Faster Pussycat on the band’s 1983 live album Smell of Female.
Updated of course, this is one version of the night-time world of old New York that Bambara occupy, a domain that mixes the ancient and the new, a nocturnal playground where you can spend time with bad company doing bad things.
The trio’s singer Blaze Bateh updates the visage on this Love On My Mind mini-album’s grungily finest moment Point And Shoot: ‘Rooftop girls / standing shoulder-to-shoulder, naked figures with their hips / cocked’.
It’s not quite the sleazy opus the words suggest, but in taking cues from photographer Nan Goldin’s mid-eighties’ opus The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency, it reaffirms what the band have always been about, this linking of the raw and primal urges of our past to the modern way of limiting ourselves to danger and spontaneity.
It hasn’t changed, even if the times have. Bateh and sibling Reid, along with fellow band member William Brookshire, attempted to piece together the follow up to 2020’s spaghetti-gothic masterpiece Stray at arm’s length, only to scrap the results for reasons of inauthenticity.
Reconvening in their adopted home and working with Claudius Mittendorfer (Interpol, Parquet Courts), the special sauce quickly began to flow again, and Love On My Mind is a next chapter that both levels up and doubles down on Bambara’s intoxicating mythos.
Sketching in words is one of Bateh’s talents; opener Slither In The Rain reinvigorates a character from their debut Shadow On Everything, a man who he says, ‘Throws bottles at airplanes and dances a two-step in the pattern of a figure-8’. The song itself though is a departure, synth and mood heavy, the singer’s drawl raking across it like a growling dog.
Has the world changed or just us? Anything here’s still possible; Birds is a rare love song, the oldest curse refracted back through a prism of needling guitar and melodrama set on a hallucinogenic train ride, whilst Mythic Love is a widescreen duet with Orville Peck collaborator Bria Salmena.
As if to pull back from the edge of normality/modernity however, the music that completes this small screen epic is familiarly messy and obscured. Closer Little Wars navigates powerfully through their default emotional pan – loneliness, despair, longing – whilst Feelin Like A Funeral dials into the adrenaline keystrokes of a knifing, as close to the primeval rock n roll vein they want to hit as things get throughout.
It isn’t Lux’s world anymore, it’s Blaze’s. Love On My Mind doesn’t have any more answers for what that means but is still a home for the victims of reality they shelter.
And whether you’re man or woman, this is a fine steppingstone between their last great work and the next one.
