Hugo Race And The True Spirit - Goldstreet Sessions

by Jon Rogers

published: 11 / 11 / 2003

Hugo Race And The True Spirit - Goldstreet Sessions

Label: Glitterhouse Records
Format: CD

Experimental, but oddly apathetic-sounding new record from original Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds guitarist, Hugo Race

Review

Hugo Race might be best known for being one of the original guitarists in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - the group he joined from the earlier Playing with Marionettes - but that really only makes up part of the story. Having left the Bad Seeds after their debut album he went on to join the cult Melbourne band The Wreckery and has been playing with The True Spirit since 1988. 'The Goldstreet Sessions' is avant-blues combined with experimental rock and then used as a soundtrack to an unhinged Francis Ford Coppola road movie where it's not just the hitcher you've got to be wary of as you hurtle across the American desert. It's an unsettling experience. None more so than on the 10-minute centrepiece "Is Your Love Strong". Race intones: "Is your love strong, strong enough to survive?" virtually over and over, accompanied to an eerie backdrop of spooky guitar doodlings and unsettling sound effects. The final track 'Ramacca' is equally unsettling and brooding. Once again a supernatural, spine-tingling guitar is accompanied by a grumbled, surreal lyric about drunks being lost in an airport and shady, Mafia-types. And that's most of the tone of 'The Goldstreet Sessions'. Only 'AM Radio' lets the side down. Despite lambasting the culture of radio station's playlists and the blandness of the FM stations the song seems designed to be played on the very stations under attack. If anything though, 'The Goldstreet Sessions' lacks vitality. While Race bemoans the state of the world. He just can't summon up the motivation to get really pissed-off about it. For most of the time it sounds like he just can't be arsed. Strange and wonderful images are conjured up but for most of the time they never really go anywhere. Even 'Makes Me Mean' sounds like apathy.