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Death In Vegas | Scorpio Rising

Energy. Seduction. Rock 'n' Roll.
CD, Concrete

Tekst: Omar Muñoz-Cremers

Publicatiedatum: 12 september 2002

Can they do it again? Yes they can. Leather, the opening track of the new Death in Vegas album, demands that you utter things like "triumphant return." It's NEU! Supercharged in the 21st century, incredibly self-assured and cocky. To hammer the point home, it segues straight into Girls, where Dot Allison sings without words while the track is built up, layer by layer. One of the oldest tricks in the book. It always works. Allison returns on the slower moments of the album, 23 Lies and the amazing Diving Horses, to consolidate her title as Queen of the Frozen Soul. Together with Hope Sandoval and Nicola from Adult, she gives a feminine spin to the Death in Vegas sound that is unlike anything in rock at this time. For we are talking about a rock album, with the dub and techno elements, which at times turned The Contino Sessions into forbidden sound planets, now being largely absent, save for the spooked Richie Hawtin mix of Nadja. Having said that, I can't think of any rock band at the moment sounding this way, both sleek and full-bodied.

Although there are surprisingly strong cameos by muscle throats Liam Gallagher (on the title track) and Paul Weller (on the Gene Clark cover So You Say Lost Your Baby), it is the females whose vocals combine with the wall-of-sound approach to form something seductive and otherworldly. Psychedelic love songs, as Death in Vegas like to characterize Scorpio Rising. The central song of the album, Killing Smile, is what happens when tough guys get romantic; it may well be the best thing they have ever produced, with Hope Sandoval's lolling voice caressing a heart-piercing string arrangement by the album's secret hero, Indian violinist Dr. L. Subramaniam. Only the twelve-minute Help Yourself fails to be perfect, in spite of another sublime string section. The length of the track feels like a self-justification for being an epic, without really having anything else to show for it.

The standard objection to Death in Vegas — that they deal in an obvious mythology (boys, poetry, leather, knifes, heroin) — could be acknowledged by the title of the album, ripped from Kenneth Anger's 1964 cult film about the hidden symbolism of bikers. Yet, by feminizing this mythology, not in the Patti Smith sense of being one of the gang, but as the ecstatic Other, Scorpio Rising becomes something of a bedside dialogue, filled with the extrasensory dimension of psychedelic love.

So it is time to leave the kindergarten of rock behind you, Son. Forget those tinny New York boy bands, and get on with the real deal: music for adult men and women. Energy. Seduction. Rock 'n' Roll.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/death-in-vegas/scorpio-rising/1849/
Meer Death In Vegas op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/death-in-vegas