EXTRA

Chronique

When Mute reissued These Immortal Souls' two albums, 1987's Get Lost (Don't Lie!) and 1992's I'm Never Gonna Die Again, they decided against adding extra tracks to either; instead, they packaged them up and presented them under the title EXTRA. Alongside songs taken from singles and EPs, there are also some well-recorded live tracks that show just how powerful the band were in a live setting. Rowland S. Howard's guitar sounds like some kind of immense creature that fills the entire venue with menace and fury, while the band roil behind him like they're whipping up wicked spells and dark magic. The songs unearthed here include a run through the Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood classic "Some Velvet Morning" (with Howard playing both roles) and four songs from the time of the group's debut album. Stripped of the thin-adjacent sound of the record, hearing the songs in all their throat-ripping, window-rattling power is something of a revelation. Howard isn't afraid to smear his nasty, unhinged guitar across even the more restrained songs; the violence he does to "These Immortal Souls" in particular is almost criminal (in a good way). The studio-recorded songs are all solid-gold reminders of why These Immortal Souls are so important still; their mix of palpable danger and high drama is still hard to find done as well as it is on their cover of Alice Cooper's "Luney Tune" or the thrilling original "Bad." They also do a very credible cover of the Stooges' "Open Up and Bleed" that captures all the inherent menace in the song and adds some gothic horror. The essentials are the two albums These Immortal Souls graced the record-listening public with; EXTRA is the icing on the cake, an ideal collection of rarities and bonuses that help fill in the spaces and present a complete picture of one of the most exciting, dangerous, and gripping bands of their era, and now with these reissues, another generation.

© Tim Sendra /TiVo