Low Society - High Time (2011)

High Time is an audacious dirty blues record, the first by veteran New York slide specialist Sturgis Nikides under this particular name, which is a collaboration between he and singer Mandy Lemons. They are New York City's answer to Richard and Linda Thompson (not least because the duo actually married last winter); these songs are determinedly obsessed with classic blues themes, and they are stabbingly bitter works, indeed. Nikides returns more fearsome than ever before; a fucking beast on guitar (National Steel, of course). And then there’s Lemons, a force of nature in her own right. It’s the kind of murderous bitch-belting to shrink your dinky and give you blue balls all at once. When I say that the woman has a howl to peel paint, I mean it as a compliment. And the result of these two together…well, I can’t help smiling at a memory of a performance they gave in NY recently which I was left feeling fairly panicked by. I think that’s a natural response to an aberrant energy such as Low Society’s. If there’s anyone else doing something close to this right now, I haven’t heard it. Consummate professionalism is rare (perhaps because for most groups, it simply isn’t necessary), but to hear the savagery of these performers coupled with their purist agility, which at times borders on mythical, is something which needs no introduction or explanation. Just as rare is classicism, and here are those classic southern wasteland blues brought back defibrillated and speed-dosed, by two downtown demons who know their way around Hell better than the living are ever really supposed to. It’s all in the grooves, as they say, and you can’t help but hear it. Psychotic and masterful, this is a record and a group to pay serious attention to.