James Chance & The Contortions emerged from the late 70's No Wave scene in New York, the US version of post punk. Out of it came some interesting hybrids - The Swans, Lydia Lunch, The Lounge Lizards, DNA, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Theoretical Girls to name a few of note. Brian Eno was brought in to produce a compilation album in 1978 to capture the nascent flowers of this moment, before they succumbed to the short livedness of their own trash aesthetic. For most of these bands operated on a fatal cutting edge. An art infused wallowing in the primal joy of dissonance and screaming into a microphone as a vocal style.
And so that brings us to Mr James Chance, channelling a mutated form of James Brown, with a voice ravaged by too much coarse cut hand rolled nicotine. He was never going to be a poster boy in a teenagers bedroom. Because this was a musical career that had car crash written all over it. To say I Can't Stand Myself is edgy punk funk would be to understate what is really going on here. This man is audibly on self destruct, pushing himself right over a wall topped with inserts of cut glass. Then picking his bloody form off the floor gives you the most blistering siren of a saxophone solo. As if imitating the death wail of a goose being strangled. The sound captured here has intensity and excitement in every disheveled groove. With a virus of tawdry sex running through it. Its punk mixed with jazz cocktail, lethally exploding in the gutter.
James Chance, despite all the opportunities he's no doubt given himself to abuse his body to death, is alive and still working at the age of 70. Most of his output from the 1970's onwards has been live albums. These perhaps best capture the febrile nervy wired beast that is him. A man quite happy to be forgotten on the fringes of popular music, because that is where he's been able to do what the hell he liked, to the hilt.
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