Hi Electric

Hi Electric

Enigmas are easy to come by these days. Pseudo-sensitive art-as-rock bands dripping irony from their records like blood from their teeth. So I suppose that, in reality, the enigmatic is found in the band that refuses to be an enigma.

Memphis, Tennessee has been repeatedly stabbing itself in the back and refusing to pay the hospital bill since Chris Bell wrapped himself and his car around a light pole. Arguably the greatest drummer in rock and roll history was murdered there and no one remembers his name. It’s Al Jackson, Sr. if you yourself need reminding. Here’s to hoping you didn’t. But you did. So pay attention:

When a kid with a ragged heart on his sleeve, not a silver one or one for the girls to swoon over and chase after; when a kid with every card on the table decides to make a record, refuses to stop until it’s done (really fucking done), brings in Kevin Cubbins – an equally obsessive producer – and demands more guitar repetitiously, you inevitably end up with something. Maybe anything. But not with Neil Bartlett. It’s more than something.

Neil’s a bit too smart for it, a bit too full of self-doubt and equal parts self-will, and likes rock and roll. Do you remember when people still did that? When they wrote songs about actual things and people and shit that mattered to somebody? Before “indie rock” became a global circle jerk? When a solitary 15 year old might throw on a record and get goosebumps? Fucking turn it up so loudly he destroys the 50 dollar boombox his brother handed down to him?

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE PLAYED GUITAR? DO YOU???

Neil does.

Actually, he doesn’t. He didn’t pay close enough attention to the handjobs and the backpatting and the “local Memphis music scene” to give a good Goddamn. He kept listening to records. Good ones. Rock and roll records. They all had guitar splattered everywhere. How would he have known it “died in 1997”, some random Pitchfork writer’s “opinion” about music in time and it’s “relevance” as an artistic statement. No more! Art??? Go buy a painting of a square fucking a red triangle giving a streak of mauve head.. THIS is “real art”. Not canned hipster spam. Hurt. Love. Beauty. Disgust. Hope. Angst. All of it! And God bless Neil Bartlett for refusing to give in, or rather, thank God he didn’t know to pay attention.

See, Memphis created rock and roll. Sort of. Drove it up from Mississippi, anyway. Then it butchered its’ greats; took their lives. Alex Chilton was a relative failure there. Ardent Studios found him to intolerable. Until (of course) his recent acclaim, death, and Big Star’s notoriety. But then? Back when Sister Lovers was being recorded Chilton was banned from the same studio that lives off his name today. For Chrissake the city tore down Stax then rebuilt it after realizing they’d acted not just in haste but in utter ignorance and sin. The idiocy never ends. Elvis lived there, sure. But he died there, too….

When you don’t give a shit about “the legacy”, well, that’s when you become a Neil Bartlett. Or a Kevin Shields. Or Mark Linkous. Fuck cities. Fuck scenes. Where are the amplifiers?!?!?!

So when Neil Bartlett says Hi Electric is a few guys who “have bad teeth, smoke cigarettes, play really fucking loud, and still believe rock and roll exists and can still be dangerous” it’s like watching a five year old with an uzi. He doesn’t really know what he’s done. He’s created a truly brilliant record. And it IS dangerous. Because it’s so good the hipsters will buy it. So will the 15 year olds. It’ll enmesh all kinds of good and bad and wicked and saintly. It does. Neil does. And he doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s doing and certainly not what he’s done.

There are guitars. Lots. And rightfully so. Because it sounds like there should be. The drums are weighted and dynamic. Because it feels right. The bass is a stuttering heartbeat. Because it’s supposed to be that way.
Why? Because it just fucking is.

Rock and roll can’t be killed by academics posing as critics and hipsters parading as tastemakers. Neil Young was right. It can’t die. It may “only” be rock and roll. But some people, those who can still feel, dig rock and roll. And Hi Electric doesn’t make it, they are it.

An incredibly smart man who left Memphis as soon as he came up from The Mississippi Delta for Chicago once said, “ It may be simple but it ain’t easy.”.

Goddamn right it ain’t. Goddamn right.

www.hi-electric.com

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