Endless Boogie - Long Island

Endless Boogie – Long Island

No Quarter Records

Musical repetition, certainly in the minds of some, can seem like an unending nightmare, like reality caught up in some kind of temporal loop, where mere irritation slowly turns into maddening torture. Less dramatically, some people just find it boring. There is another side to this quality that borders on the transcendental; where the act of unchanging repetition pushes through the boredom barrier and frees the mind from its inundation by the mundane. Each repetition grows in power. Buddhist monks swear by it.

Long Island is the album where Endless Boogie gets to cast off the shackles of their past, and strike out in a new, unprecedented direction. Nope, of course they don’t, which may turn out to be good news or bad news depending on what side of the fence you stand. To some Endless Boogie may sound like an interminable Free Festival Roadhouse Rock biker band, or others may find that transcendental and mesmerising quality in them. Luckily, I’m a fan and this is another strong release from the EB boys.

If you’ve not encountered Endless Boogie before, they radiate with an alien heat found in the old records by John Lee Hooker (from who they got their name, no doubt).  Imagine 15 minutes of a long, snaking blues riff trailing off to a vanishing point that never arrives. This no vanity project for some sub Clapton-esque guitarist to hang his ‘oh so tasteful’ soloing on to: this is digging into prime locomotive blues power.  They have more in common with driving ‘Endless Straight’ of Neu!, or the more drone-y end of psychedelic music. So with opener ‘The Savageist’ (great name, by the way – I imagine it’s a tribute to me), you seem to be tuning in halfway into Endless Boogie’s err… endless boogie. Vocalist Paul Major intones his blues mysticism over a torrid, hypnotic blues chug. You’re either in for the duration, or you are not.

’Occult Banker’ (which calls to mind the weird Masonic imagery found on dollar bills) sees the Boogie on a more Stooges-y trip, still pushing forward into the distance. Cliché as it may be to describe it as such, but you can really picture a heat distorted open road here. Possibly the most interesting track here is the just shy of 15 minute finisher ‘Montgomery Manuscript’, which is more astrally inclined than the rest of the album. Major sings almost subliminally as the momentum builds in wah-wah riffs and a chiming blues raga guitar. Peyote may have been involved, who knows?

If you’re looking for an Endless Boogie album to start with, this one is as good as any other exactly because it is as good as any of their others. Never changing, continuously moving forward. 

(first published on Beard Rock)