“I hope you guys are having … fun,” says Tess Parks after around an hour, phrasing the last word as if it’s a foreign concept. Admittedly, fun isn’t the first word most people are likely to associate with the moodily hypnotic music this young Toronto singer-songwriter makes. She is presently in partnership with Anton Newcombe, fulcrum of infamously messed-up cult Californian rock’n’roll band the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Think slow, repetitive, three-chord drone-rock jams, sung in a voice so drawling and ragged that Parks sounds like she’s been gargling bong water.
Born in Berlin, the city to which Newcombe has relocated since quitting drink and drugs and an attendant propensity for violence, the album I Declare Nothing is the fruit of this collaboration, and they play it in full, backed by a four-piece band. While vocalist and lyricist Parks is unmistakably the mother of the elegantly wasted likes of German Tangerine and Mama, it’s Newcombe’s presence that looms larger. Huskier and mellower than the rakish maniac of yore, but still a sunglasses-indoors kind of guy, his guitar playing is mesmerising: be it striking single notes and letting them feed back and moan during Wehmut and Cocaine Cat, or cranking out a tremendous tremolo riff at the start of Gone.
With a Marmite-y singing style – equal parts Courtney Love and Hope Sandoval – and the untamed look of a young Joan Jett, Parks is a harder talent to fathom. She’s an Alan McGee protege, signed to his new-ish label 359 Music; her lyrics, when audible through the fuzz and Mellotron-soaked din, speak intriguingly to dark thoughts and psychedelic experiences. But as she stares disconnectedly across the audience’s heads, it’s hard to tell if she’s deep in the moment, or just kind of bored. When Parks stands with her arms folded, looking like she’s waiting for a bus during the roaming instrumental passages of a superb concluding cover of The Doors’s Five to One, if she is having fun, then it must be happening inwardly.
- At the Exchange, Bristol, 17 July. Box office: 0117-930 4538. Then touring.
