The Murder City Devils
Empty Bottles Broken Hearts (Sub Pop)
by Dave Liljengren
One of the most eagerly awaited releases of 1998 here in Rain City is Empty Bottles Broken Hearts, the debut from Murder City Devils. I mean this in all seriousness. This is not more of the usual rockcrit bullroar where writers who didn’t make the cut as publicists launch a Pershing missile of misplaced hyperbole trying to make four teenagers with guitars sound like the second coming of sliced bread. No, MCD is the real deal. After releasing only a handful of hard-to-find vinyl singles, MCD has earned some well-deserved cred as the best live band in town. On a good night, they kick the stuffing out the Supersuckers and Zeke, two pile-driving live acts and the Seattle bands whose names come up most frequently when the beer-fueled conversation turns to garage punk. (Zeke is actually from Tacoma. This couldn’t matter less.) MCD has taken their act on the road and played big gigs across the west. They will be burning down your town soon. In the meantime, you can pick up the CD.
MCD fires out a tight, steely guitar sound the way an explosion in a fireworks factory sends out sparks. Forget hammer-of-the-gods drumming, MCD’s got hammer-of-John-Bonham drumming. This blissful chaos is tempered with ghostly squeaks from an organ that sounds like its windpipes clogged after smoking a pack a day for decades. MCD lead singer, Spencer Moody, is especially scary because, with horn-rimmed glasses, a Republican haircut, and tattoos covering every centimeter of his arms, he looks like a poetry grad student gone horribly wrong. Make no mistake, he sings with the maniacal urgency of a man who just had a dagger tattooed on his foreskin. Only someone living with the recent memory of needles and chemicals invading his privates could bring the right speed-addled demoniac vocal insouciance to otherwise poetic tunes like “Every Shitty Thing” and “18 Wheels.” With obsidian solid instrumental performances, hookish song constructions, and mind-invading lyrics (“I’m subtle, subtle like a T. Rex,” Moody sings, for example, in “Ready For More”), MCD fills Empty Bottles with more high-octane punk intoxicants than can be legally sold in the Bible Belt on Sundays.
(2514 Fourth Ave Seattle WA 98121)
