Queer – Desperate Living – Review

Queer

Desperate Living (Spanish Fly)
by Lex Marburger

It’s about time I got around to listening to Queer. They’re one of those bands that you can’t believe is only a trio. On Desperate Living (Spanish Fly) there’s a guitar that is only tuned to two notes and a slide, a monster bass, and some primordial thunder god on the drums. The songs feel like you’re walking down the hall of a stranger’s house at a party, a combination of wine, beer, bourbon, Jägermeister, vodka, and tequila coursing through your head and belly. You know that the apartment isn’t built on a fault line, but the words “San Andreas” keep flashing in your mind, which (by the way) has felt like it’s gonna come drooling out your ears ever since that guy put Dredd Foole and the Din on the stereo. The walls are bending to smack you on the head, and the bathroom door is looking like a scene from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Strange beings are whirling past you, dressed in peroxide and leather, talking at 78 rpm. They give you funny looks, but are easily scared away by a spittle-soaked snarl. The bathroom door looms before you, awesome in its power, terrible in all the control it has over your existence. The door opens, and you damn near fall on the antiseptic tile. The only light available is fluorescent. It illuminates your sickly, pale face in the mirror. A thread of saliva hangs from your lower lip, your left nostril is caked with dried mucus, eyes bloodshot from cigarette smoke, and there’s a mysterious scratch on your cheek that wasn’t there when you left home that evening. The face you’re looking at is the face of a stranger, twisted and distorted by the dime-store mirror’s reflection. There’s a spasm in your gut, like someone just kicked you. Twice. Three times. You bend over the sink… nothing. “It’s okay,” you think, “I can drive home.”

You know that feeling? What, like it’s only happened to me? Get Desperate Living anyway; it’s a definite must listen, if for no other reason than it’s got the best cover of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” I’ve heard so far.