Monolith Cocktail Blog

LP  REVIEW

Ayfer Simms discovers the cinematic noir of the Movie Star Junkies, and finds it evoking plenty of lyrically disturbing criminal fantasies and scenery. Careful now: she know’s where the bodies have been buried. 

Movie Star Junkies   ‘Evil Moods’   (Voodoo Rhythm)  1^st December 2014

‘The Movie Star Junkies or Rolo Tomassi resurrected.’

Transported to the desert of Los Angeles, or at least anywhere with a big enough desert to abandon crime victims, an explosive groovy rock gang rehearses the good, the bad and the ugly: The sheriffs are jumping about with stolen guns, the bandits are teasing each other with fake gold and the rest of the horde is watching the spectacle while ingurgitating the ‘all so precious’ prohibited liquor. The guitars, both spine-tingling and spirited with its reverb and oriental rock effects of the 60s as well as the piercing and racy vocals of the band lead the show into the world of crime: The album portrays the victims, the wise guys, the crooks, the fugitives all thrown in the same bag: They dance with violence and their rhythms are detonating in a joyous furry.

The Movie Star Junkies are the Tarantino of the music scene: The band’s name fabulously matches their favourite theme too: the hardboiled crime fictions. Tracks like ‘Jim Thompson’ refers to the tormented alcoholic writer of noir crime novels and ‘Red Harvest’ is the title of one of them, described by the French author Andre Gide as being a novel of ‘remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror’.

“The Mobsters” are back from the dead: On their way from hell they brought all the skeletons hidden in their closets and they have the rhythm in their bones; Rolo Tomassi emerges with a vengeful grand smile while a newly acquired body fleshed out with all the murdered crowd: The clever liquor peddler, the corrupt politician’s sweetheart, the wasted patrol man: All thrown in the same bag and shaken until they all come out attuned to the same sound.

The tunes are energetic; they have that voodoo spaghetti western like rhythm to them, a pinch of the old pulp movies and a psychedelic disco sound reminiscent of the music played during the action scenes of Starsky and Hutch.

With tracks like ‘In The Evening Sun’ the slow and hypnotic melody throws us in the mind of someone who did take that bullet: about to sink into death he watches the evening sun go down for a very last time; chilling but perhaps the most startling track of the album: He is Joe Gilis lying on the pool talking beyond his grave, he is Fredo Corleone about to swim with the fish.

Enticing, banging, full of suspense, the tunes describe a world gone completely mad; certainly an album that will send you, if not at the bottom of the desert sand, at least in front of your screens to discover some good old noir classics. It is only a matter of time before a director hires the Movie Stars Junkies for a cinematic collaboration.