Elliot Kendall – Le Hot Show – Review

Elliot Kendall

Le Hot Show
by Garrick H.S. Brown

Get past the misleading cover art, where powerjive genius Elliot Kendall looms like some goofy black-clad vampire above the San Fran skyline. No, this is not the soundtrack to the UBC Network’s Dracula, Underworld P.I. No, all you Anne Rice freaks with your hand-filed fangs can just cool your creepy jets and flutter back to your lairs. Elliot Kendall and Le Hot Show is not some masturbatory Gothic gorefest, but is in fact, the swingingest Jump-n-Roll-Hickabilly-Western-Gypsy-Jazz-Trailer-Park-Swing album to come down the line since, well… the last really good one.

Kendall, a mercurial young guitar scholar from San Francisco, is quick to blame his former manager and stage show coordinator. “We first utilized Kiko as part of the stage show; you know, introducing the band and our bevy of overweight strippers and such. He had a real feel for it, and the fact that he was a tuxedo-clad Indonesian dwarf really seemed to add to the whole effect.” When pressed on the subject, Kendall reluctantly expounds: “Unfortunately, as our stage show got more elaborate and began to include elements as diverse as used hospital equipment and mock welfare lines, the tiny bastard picked up just enough English to figure out that indentured servitude was actually illegal in this country. Little shit hightailed it back to Jakarta with one of my amps, but not before he sabotaged my original cover stills. If I ever get my hands on the little cocksucker – he’ll be pushing up daisies! Really tiny ones!”

Original cover art was to have been digitally-altered photos manipulated by Kendall himself. “It was a cut-and-paste gig. I created an image of Louis Jordan in bed with Bob Wills and all of The Texas Playboys. I’m really good with computers, I’ve got a kick-ass Amiga! Anyways, the whole thing was really perverse – it was an unholy marriage – like my music!”

A steady and serious horn section makes this entire album a swinger with just a hint of twang. A perfect tune for the kind of wild swing dancing that serves as nothing but a mask for male alcoholic hyper-aggression, and weird female fear-of-loneliness supersubservience. But whether or not you know of, or approve of, these types… this album will make you want to head down to your local Pompadour Room, proclaim yourself a mechanic, and introduce yourself to everybody as “Johnny.”