Bloody Minded

John Fahey - Popular Songs Of Christmas & New Year's (1983) {Rounder–Varrick CDVR012 rel 1994}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 220 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 94 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 6 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1983, 1994 Rounder Records / Varrick Records | CD VR 012
Finger-Picked Guitar / Christmas / Contemporary Folk / Progressive Folk

The famously abrasive and eccentric John Fahey – a brilliant guitarist and composer who once recorded under the name Blind Joe Death – is not the first person one would expect to make a sweet and apparently unironic album of Christmas instrumentals. Being the bloody-minded coot that he was, he made several, all of them wonderful. Popular Songs of Christmas & New Year's is the second of them, this one recorded with the help of fellow guitarist Terry Robb.

A sly and nasty riposte to domestication, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is a bloody-minded record, at times sounding like a cattle-prod surge delivered directly to the spine. A stocktaking of the previous four decades of outsider blare - from La Monte Young, to Metal Machine Music, to even the earliest Butthole Surfers - Coil soils their pawn-shop electronics in blood and sweat, a muscular return to industrial roots. The nominal normal track, "I Am the Green Child," stumbles along like Krautrock coupled with the Exorcist soundtrack. Singer John Balance intones a pretentious and portentous text, voice almost drown in a thick gauze of processing. After this wheezing discourse crawls to a halt, several tracks follow like the lament of a dying washing machine…