Grandpa Death Experience - The Unforgiving Shoe of the Future
by Kevin Wierzbicki
.
If you think this band's name and choice of album titles is weird, wait till you get a whiff of their background story. The band is helmed by singer and guitarist Ron Goudie, who was one of the founding members of Enigma Records, and he signed, produced, engineered or mixed everyone from Christian rockers Stryper to monsters GWAR and other luminaries like the Flaming Lips, Poison, T.S.O.L, Agent Orange and Mojo Nixon. But then hard times, partially brought on by substance abuse, hit and dragged Goudie to the bottom, leaving him penniless and directionless. A move to Amsterdam, probably not the wisest choice at the time, turned out to be Goudie's saving grace, as there he slowly recovered and put Grandpa Death Experience together, and now here he is with a set of a dozen songs that were no doubt long simmering over his period of despair. The slightly woozy, plodding groove of "Hell is Cold" opens the effort and it's followed by "Heavy Load," a grunge-y swirl of torment that has brief moments of positivity that portray attempts to get out of a narcotic funk. "Broken Heart" tones down the musical misery a bit but Goudie's voice still drips with pain on the ballad; "Smoke 2 Much" sounds like the bluesier side of Motorhead as Goudie applies his gargles-with-gasoline vocal bent to lines like "it's raining flying saucers." The album ends with the oddly country-tinged "Fat Chance," a cut that in its bizarreness deals with the possibility of a slip back into dissipation. Too bad that Goudie had to go through what he did to get himself to this record, but The Unforgiving Shoe of the Future is more than just a good start to the upswing; the underground has yielded up an authentic gem here. Get your copy here.
Grandpa Death Experience - The Unforgiving Shoe of the Future
Rating:
