See: These Immortal Souls
The six strings that drew blood are here again! After years cast adrift, the two These Immortal Souls LPs are finally back in the world, and now accompanied by an additional record that hoovers up the singles and some select recordings that landed either side of their initial release. The Birthday Party stand in no-one's shadow and the two Rowland S. Howard solo albums are about as sexy as outsiderdom can get, but for me these were always the recordings that hit hardest, a supple, sultry and sardonic reshaping of rock band dynamics that make the best sense of living after midnight. Increasingly I'm led to think that Howard might well be post-punk's Alex Chilton, a prodigiously talented and romantically doomed figure who has slowly shifted from chosen one to tragic lost soul to mythologised icon, one reissue at a time. Listening again now, I'm Never Gonna Die Again could be his Mt Olympus, a fury of metallic KO grind and a voice that's seen the end coming and wont run from it. The lights in the room go down a touch when the volume goes up on this one. Get Lost (Don't Die) and Extra are no mere foothills either, further extensions of Howard's anti-hero vaudeville that show a keen sense of the absurd as much as he was welcoming in oblivion. For a certain kind of soul, this is The Eternal Music. I count myself amongst them. Now these are more readily available, perhaps a few more people can too.
