The Indelicates: DAVID KORESH SUPERSTAR

Please, God, tell me this is all just a bad joke.  Surely The Indelicates don’t intend this appalling stylistic mishmash of American music to be an actual artistic statement?  This is their way of getting back at the FBI for allowing two dozen British nationals to die in the Waco fire, right?  Consider the U.S.A. duly punished, then; David Koresh Superstar is by far the worst album I’ve heard in the past decade at least.

The album starts off with the Who-meets-Elbow blustery pop of “Remember The Alamo!”, as bluntly British-sounding as a song with that title could possibly be.  Lyrically, it’s really stupid, and Simon Indelicate’s singing is distractingly gaudy, but it’s kind of a cool song otherwise; red herring.  What follows is a nearly unlistenable collection of phony accents and clichés and horribly incompatible vocals and instrumentation slung together by a band with no sense of rhythm or decency.  Are they making fun of Americana, or do they just suck at it?  Nobody cares.

We get it: you’re trying to combine countryish/folksy stylings with hippie-musical melodrama into a narrative about the 1993 Branch Davidian saga.  It’s pretty easy to take pot shots at a cult leader, and I hope it was also easy to write, record and produce the horrid, annoying songs that populate this album, because every ounce of energy expended on this pointless exercise is a slap in the face of actual musicians struggling to get noticed.  The final insult: a painfully overwrought, grating rendition of “John The Revelator”.  Fine, nothing is sacred, but gospel music as a whole is now slightly devalued.

I suppose The Indelicates are known as agitators like their name suggests; maybe playing shitty music “ironically” is their m.o., thereby possibly making some sense of this colossal musical nuisance.  Moreover, any bad reviews will probably only encourage them, as they snicker to themselves about how we don’t get it and delight in the ire they’ve inspired.  After all, unless their press release is lying, Rolling Stone is very impressed.  Yes, I imagine the joke’s on me; my loss, I guess, that I prefer listening to good music over being duped.