Dave Cloud And The Gospel Of Power, Today is the Day That They Take Me Away - Album review

Download: Bimbo; Just Like You; Shoot Me the Juice, Lucy

Dave Cloud was an avant-garage-rock primitivist whose last album is now sadly upon us, following his death from cancer this year.

It is apt that his response to medical necessity should reference Nervous Norvus’s bad-taste classic “Transfusion”, while elsewhere his Beefheart-ian growl is applied in breezily lascivious manner to such inappropriate recipients as “Angelina”, “Party Doll” and “Bimbo”, whom the 50-something singer tries to pick up after school.

“Bimbo, you’re my No 1,” he leers over a gloriously chugging Velvets-style garage riff, the very image of the man your parents warned you about. But while the women of Nashville may sleep a little easier tonight, it’s sad to lose such a determinedly individual outsider talent, the vulgar bark of whose records, one suspects, was rather worse than his bite.