Fire of Love

L.A.'s Jeffrey Lee Pierce will never be confused with most modern day blues-rock practitioners. His music never featured the standard blues riffs or structures, but possessed the same chilling, lonesome feeling, that same desperate drive to transcend life's sorrows. Fire of Love is an appropriately haphazard recorded collection of spirited wailings from a man for whom music was pure catharsis (Pierce passed away in 1996 from a brain hemorrhage). "Sex Beat" begins things with a powerful country shuffle and Pierce's untutored wail. "Preaching the Blues" twists the blues tradition into the punk gutter. "Promise Me" reverberates with a slow, haunted psychedelic drip. "She's Like Heroin to Me" exposes the band's dark underbelly, an opiate-derived insanity where Pierce clashes against Ward Dotson's reckless slide guitars. These loose, rambling recordings sound particularly alien in modern times where record productions are often calibrated to perfect machine-like rhythms. The Gun Club's releases are a glorious mess, slipping in and out of the groove, led not by melodic or rhythmic invention, but by a lead singer who's seeing ghosts in his waking life.