Unearthed electricity in hi-fi grit
By the time Thunder Express rolled tape for French television in 1972, MC5 had already torched the world’s stage and watched their fuse burn out too fast. The Motor City quintet—once militant, psychedelic, and screaming through Marshall stacks like revolutionaries with fuzz pedals—was on the edge of implosion. And yet, what we get here is as close as we’ll ever come to hearing what Lester Bangs kept raving about: MC5 in a studio, sharp, alive, and caught in the act.
“Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa” opens like a soul exorcism in biker boots, with Rob Tyner belting the title like a mantra at the altar of Little Richard and James Brown. There’s a groove here—tight, relentless—and it’s saturated with a kind of holy garage gospel that transcends its own repetition. The guitars slash but don’t blur, the drums punch like a street-corner sermon, and everything is dialed in just enough to hear the intention behind the chaos.
The session is cleaner than Kick Out the Jams, but no less feral. It’s as if the band were momentarily allowed to breathe in a controlled environment, and instead of losing their bite, they focused it. This isn’t the sound of a group trying to recapture their past glory—it’s five men burning the last fumes of raw creative combustion, and somehow landing squarely on their feet.
There’s no posturing here, no arena polish. Just a band caught at twilight, still louder than God, still shaking off the system. Thunder Express isn’t just a historical document—it’s the MC5 finally being heard.
No comments:
Post a Comment