Take one part Gun Club:
Add one part Cocteau Twins:
And, hey presto, you get "Yellow Eyes":
Way back in the mid-1980s, I listened to a lot of Gun Club, and I also had a possibly unhealthy obsession with Cocteau Twins, in particular the "Treasure" LP. But those were two worlds that I would never have imagined might one day collide. I mean, come on. Southern gothic screech-and-wail versus ethereal English gothic? (Okay, so they had "gothic" in common, but those days who didn't?)
Hence, to say that the news that one day filtered through that Robin Guthrie would be producing what was to become the fourth Gun Club album, "Mother Juno", took me by surprise has an element of understatement to it. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance. To be honest, I wasn't even sure I was looking forward to the result; I kind of liked them both the way they were (although by 1987 I was forming the view that both of their best days may have been behind them).
The resultant album, while patchy, had high points that were higher than I could ever have imagined. "Yellow Eyes" was undoubtedly the centrepiece, and if you had taken the time to imagine what a mash-up of The Gun Club and Cocteau Twins might sound like, "Yellow Eyes" is what you would have come up with. It is uncanny. I swear that it isn't only my imagination that leads me to think that at various points Jeffrey Lee Pierce even sings like Elizabeth Fraser. (Of course, it is also possible that I have taken leave of my senses.)
And to top it all off, Blixa Bargeld, then of the Bad Seeds (another of my mid-80s obsessions), floats some unworldly guitar across the surface of the thing.
