Queen of Siam

Lydia Lunch.
It wasn't her real name, of course. Lydia Koch...I think I read that somewhere. She earned the moniker because she used to filch food to feed her famished and impoverished musician friends.
Punk priestess. Poet. Iconoclast. Outspoken activist.
She'd risen from the blackened scrawl of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks; a gang of musical miscreants who produced venomous, no-fi punk tunes that blazed past in a blitzkrieg of dissonant guitars and Lunch's shredded howls. Most of the tracks barely scraped the two minute mark. Even now, re-released and cleaned up by Cherry Red Records they still reek of damp and mould; a thin, dirty sound - half white noise.

Her debut solo album - the first under her real/not-real name was a different deal altogether.
'Queen of Siam' (1980 - original release).
I'm not sure what you'd call it. Noirish jazz meets noise rock. Big band sass and swing colliding with a hail of razor-toothed no-wave guitars, all topped off with Lunch's trademark drawl and slur of a vocal style.

Bachelor pad music for those with murderous intentions.

Cartoon jazz. Hell, they brought in the orchestra best known for playing 'the Flintsones' theme music. Not a yabba dabba doo in sight here though, just that voice...not the whiskey-and-cigarettes predator rasp of her later recordings, or the bile-spitting screeches of some of her other works. Here Lunch plays a coquette; her flat, almost affect-less croon sounds girlish, childlike, even (dare I say it): cute. But there's the old bite there, the concealed knife, the sharp teeth behind the soft lips. She's Betty Boop with blood on her shirt.
Lydia Lunch has never been much of a singer; but she's always been one hell of a vocalist.
And she doesn't really sing here. At all. Instead she laces her half-spoken delivery with sufficient pace and patter that it fits the music perfectly.

This is music for grimy hotel rooms strewn in dead neon light. For crowded cocktail bars where behind every smile lies a trap; an end. For evenings that begin in romance and end with a man's body stuffed in a trunk. For the salt-and-sour smell of fresh rain falling on scorched concrete streets. It's smoke rising from a snuffed cigarette, for nights scented by cheap perfume and cheaper wine. It's musical grafitti snarling on crooked urban walls.
It's all a fiction. A pulp fiction, no less. There's really no more truth to be found here than in Yma Sumac and her Andean mountaintops. But this is a fantasy of a dirtier, grittier sort.
This is for the night. And it is all so damn much fun.

Opening track 'Mechanical Flattery' sets the tone. The lyrics are disturbing as all get-out. The imagery perverse. Lunch sneers them, her accent thick. There is a taunting quality to her delivery. A bass riff: plucked and twanged in miss-shapen jazz chords, like a crueller or more traumatised Marc Ribot. Piano chords descend like they're stumbling half-drunk down a staircase. Deep drums that seem both echoing and weirdly muffled propel the song forward. Sax blasts through, spiralling downward, downward, downward.

Dear God, 'Gloomy Sunday' comes at you next. Lunch sounds exhausted in her grief as she mutter-whispers the lyrics, too shattered to even attempt to sing them. The music is played delicately and faithfully here but the sax re-emerges and is laced with far more snap and hunger than you'll ever hear in another recording of this song. It has an aching noirish vibe to it that makes me think of 'Lost Highway' or any other damn film in David Lynch's ouevre.
Does she sing the cop-out final verse; the one added later when it seemed that the 'suicide song' was claiming to many love-ravaged victims (the 'don't worry it was all a dream' passage)?
What do you think?
This may just be the most strangely perfect of all the renderings of this infamous song.

'Tied and Twist' leers out at you. The plucked chords are sharp and biting - is that both guitar and some kind of distressed keyboard or has said guitar been manipulated and distorted through various effects pedals? That taunting back-and-forth rhythm is back in Lunch's voice.

Her performance of 'Spooky' is a delight. Her voice taunting and kittenish. The song sounds cheeky, smirking.

'Los Banditos' is a stunning thing, a duel between angular post-punk bass scratches and exquisitely-played Spanish-style acoustic. The sax (or could it be organ?) creaks back and forth in a see-sawing vamp. The drummer lays down a straightforward rhythm and sticks steadfastedly to it, keeping the whole piece in check.

'Atomic Bongos' is a playful piece. Again, the abrasive, skin-scraping guitars - this time with a sort of mutant surf thing going on - the driving percussion and the rocking back-and-forth pulse of her rhythmic vocals. It does indeed boast a rather fine bongo solo, but that is outdone when the brass, guitars and bass come swinging back in.

'Lady Scarface' is another stand-out. The J. Billy VerPlanck orchestra makes it presence really felt here. Throwing down a bright, bewildering pyrotechnic display of brass and strings, only to have their work chopped and mangled, re-sculpted by Lunch's conspirators (Pat Irwin, Robert Quine, Jack Ruby, and Dougie Bowne); looped and sampled, graffitied over with scrawls of guitar and lurching piano chords. Meanwhile, Lunch relates a compelling narrative: stood up by her date she sets her eyes on a near-pederastic sexual pursuit.

Lunch sits out the boisterous, convulsive instrumental 'A Cruise to the Moon' - a delirious (and utterly delicious) fusion of lively cartoon brass and biting noise rock. Lounge music gone feral.

'Carnival Fat Man' begins with fulsome gales of belly laughter and circus-inspired music. It feels like some pychogenic comedy skit, but this is Lunch's show and there is something very disturbing here; she fires her questions only to be answered by two men (one of whom I sincerely hope has had his voice slowed to lower the pitch). IIIIIIIIII'm the faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat maaaaan.

'Knives in the Drain' brings it all together. The scorching, mangled fretwork that evokes a buzzing saw, the barroom piano, the steadfast percussion, the brilliant (and relentlessly cheerful) playing of the J. Billy VerPlanck orchestra, and lyrics that drip with malice, dark delight and regret; all delivered in Lunch's velvet, kittenish purr.

'Blood of Tin' is a nightmare; lurching, seasick chords pursue Lunch's harrowing stream-of-consciousness down into the very darkest of places. She relates this imagery onslaught in an unfaltering, moderated tone; seemingly not needing to pause for breath.

And with that we're done. Just over half an hour has past and Lunch has drawn us deep into her blackly hilarious, twisted, acerbic and utterly innovative world. This album doesn't just withstand the test of time, it transcends it. Nothing here feels dated or tired. The brightness and vibrancy of the colourful orchestration and the snarling dissonance of the kohl-eyed punk - two mucial elements that should make deeply uneasy bedfellows here unify into something inspired. Cherry Red Records' re-release of the disc (2009) polishes up the sound and adds some fine new artwork and beautifully-penned liner notes from the mastermind herself. It also tosses in a couple of multi-media tracks but doesn't throw in any more bonus material to pad the album's lean, pared-down running time. Nor should it. 'Queen of Siam' is a perfectly self-contained little world. For a thrilling half an hour Lydia Lunch has you between her teeth.