The Immortal Lee County Killers

Love is a Charm of Powerful Trouble (Estrus)
by Grady Gadbow

The first time I heard this band I came up with the concise, if not real articulate, idea that I was hearing “The Blues” except… ya know… like, all fucked up. Then I felt pretty well-validated when I found out their first album was called The Essential Fucked Up Blues. This record is all fucked up too, and I think at this point I should explain what we mean by “fucked up” in the ILCK2 lexicon. When these two evil men fuck shit up, they don’t just, like, hit something with a brick. Clearly, to be fucked up by Chetley YZ and J.R.R. Token (those’re their names) is a more subtle and dangerous thing than mere destruction. This fucked up blues is rough, but it ain’t dumb. It’s young, but it ain’t green. It’s sinister and it ain’t fooling, even when it’s kinda silly. It’s damn hard to have a really fresh take on “The Blues” these days. I mean, what is rock ‘n’ roll but fucked up blues, right? Fuckin’ eh.

Guitar and drums and vocals is all you get from a band with just two guys in it, and it doesn’t sound like they bought fifty amps and plugged them all together either, and that’s kind of the point. Most real Southern serial killers work in two-man teams, and if they had a whole bunch of guys on stage and they all called themselves the some kind of something somewhere killers or whatever, it’d seem kinda shticky. These guys, on the other hand, might actually be involved in some unsolved ritualistic homicides in rural areas around the Southern, or possibly rust belt United States. They fit the profile, anyway. Two intelligent guys who choose to spend a lot of time traveling around on the highway with deeply held and slightly weird ideas about tradition, evil, and beauty? You never know…
(PO Box 2125 Bellingham, WA 98227)