Album Review: The Beasts - Still Here

A new album from the remaining members of The Beasts Of Bourbon (under the name The Beasts) is a bittersweet thing in light of the passing of bassist Brian Hooper and Spencer P Jones. The name of the band and the album are self-explanatory and though there’s enough to justify them coming together to record new music and tour, there’s the unavoidable sense of a band operating on dwindling returns.

The album was recorded only a couple of weeks after their last gig with Hooper and is made up of songs formed from, in their words, "sketchy ideas", plus some "jams" and covers. Jones is there, but he only made it onto one track, the slow and swampy blues crawl of At The Hospital.

Things get off to a good start with the one-two punch of Tex Perkins’ On My Back and Kim Salmon’s heavy grunge/garage-rock track Pearls Before Swine. Both possess the right amount of grit and sleaze, worthy additions to The Beasts’ canon of work. In terms of covers: Warren Zevon’s My Shit’s Fucked Up gets a passable workout, as does Frank Zappa’s The Torture Never Stops, which fares better with its loose and queasy sound.

It’s All Lies and Your Honour sound like half-baked ideas – one-riff jams that were fleshed out long enough to justify calling them songs. The flip side to them is the shadowy drone and grind of Don’t Pull Me Over, a sign of the band’s willingness to still effectively explore the avant-garde end of primal rock'n'roll, an inner city cousin to Springsteen’s Nebraska. 

What The Hell Was I Thinking sounds like a late night Rolling Stones jam and gloriously so, as searing electric slide and acoustic guitars weave a drunken dance while Perkins laments his actions in his wonderful country howl and croon.

All in all Still Here is a flawed beast, but I guess they always were weren’t they. That was, and remains, the band’s charm. Still Here is a collective throwing together of ideas that works often and fails sometimes.