The very first things I heard by Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires were tracks from this album. My friend Paul Cookson had been at a festival where he had seen the band and posted a video on Facebook along with the legend “My new favourite band”. The video had the Glory Fires playing “Sweet Disorder!” And “Black & White Boys” live in a studio, no audience. It took me about 20 seconds of them playing to figure out what Paul meant and to realise this was the most exciting thing I’d seen and heard in quite some time (I’ve linked that video below as well as a track from the album). 

This album was very quickly purchased (on delicate Pink vinyl this time) and I quickly realised those two songs were no flash in the pan, this generous 17 song album was packed full of them. It opens with some of that fury hanging over from “Dereconstructed”, “Breaking It Down” see’s Lee Bains almost stumbling over his lyrics he has that much to say and I still marvel that he manages to fit the line “O, children, how do we scrap globalist American plutocracy and build us a magic city?” into the gospel-ish call and response chorus of “Sweet Disorder!”.

“Good Old Boy” is a pure hardcore Punk howl; “Black And White Boys” you can hear below and then out come the acoustic guitars for the Side 1 ending “Whitewash”. 

Side 2 kicks off with “Underneath The Sheets Of White Moie” with its rolling, circular feeling riff. “I Heard God” reins things in a little and feels like a really important point on this record where all the fury, and Southern Gothic come together.

Then we reach what is likely my favourite (among many) on here as “Crooked Letters” closes out side 2. It starts out with a class of young children chanting what I imagine is a rhyme used to remember a spelling (like the scene in “Matilda” with the rhyme to remember how to spell difficulty), you work it out…

M - I - crooked letter, crooked letter - I - crooked letter, crooked letter - I - humpback, humpback - I…

This chant is gradually chopped up and becomes the loop that the song is based around tied to another of those slinky hypnotic riffs the Glory Fires are so good at. It’s the tale of a Middle Eastern boy dumped into a Southern school and builds from a slow start to a great crescendo.

As we head toward the close title-ish track “Nail My Feet To The Southside Of Town” tells the tale of how they got where they are and their love of their hometown and “The Picture Of A Man” is a most introspective ballad full of the hope that our oppressors will “fade to black”. The albums closes out with “Save My Life!” In which after all the anger and introspection that has come before we’re told “Don’t you tell me, “It’s only rock’n’roll”, When I’ve seen it wrestle truths from noise, Save my life!”

There’s a lot more light and shade on this album which, sound wise, is a perfect amalgam of the previous two. It was recorded almost entirely live in the studio. this means some of the subtleties of the lyrics are lost in the live thrash, and there’s a lot to digest in Lee Bains tumbling almost stream of consciousness lyrics, if you’re going to listen to this record head over to gloryfires.com and keep the lyrics to hand. It keeps me, at least, coming back for more time after time. This is a great album and probably my most listened to album of the past 3 years, give it a try ?

Sweet Disorder! and Black & White Boys - https://youtu.be/SgOe3vsqVoM

Crooked Letters - https://youtu.be/_FFiwsB58WI

Lee and the Glory Fires have skipped labels and now find themselves on revered label SubPop. They’ve also souped up their sound, mixing in some of the MC5’s fire with those hot damn southern riffs. They are finding a definite style that will bleed over into their next album, a bigger pinch of Punk Rock is being added to the mixture. 

The result is, this album is bloody ferocious!

Opening song “The Company Man” hangs off a riff equal parts Detroit and Tuscaloosa and concerns itself with Alabaman steel bosses who are “Putting profits in the black with businessmen on Sunday, Monday morning, beating prophets black and blue” the subtext s plain to see. I must sit down with the lyric sheet again and de-cipher more of what’s being said.

And on it goes like that with no let up. The title track compares the current state of the USA to the Reconstruction period after the Civil War; “We Dare Defend Our Rights” points out the irony in the State motto of Alabama; “Flags!”, well I’m sure you can work it out. The only let up you get is the start of “What’s Good And Gone” and final song “Dirt Track” which both verge on laid back compared to what’s gone before, but by the time we hit the chorus the fury is back.

My one difficulty with this album is it sounds bloody terrible! The whole record (this one on luscious Yellow vinyl BTW) is distorted as though everything was turned up to 11 and then they pressed the record button and hoped for the best. Maybe it’s what they were after but it means there are some great songs hiding in there under the mess and the aural mud. 

The Company Man - https://youtu.be/unwBMVXA0UI

Another album on lovely coloured vinyl (this one is purple) and one that should really be discussed after you’ve read what I have to say about their next but one album (“Youth Detention…”, where I first encountered them). But as chronology doesn’t work like that you’ll have to wait a couple of days, so here goes.

I was lucky enough to tour the USA on a number of occasions and, while there, some of us developed a liking for Country Music and the music of the South, the folk music of immigrant America perhaps. This will manifest itself in this collection with records by Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams and in a more recent incarnation the Drive-By Truckers, Steve Earle, Jason Isbell and the marvellously monikered Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires.

Lee Bains comes out of the punk rock scene in Birmingham Alabama and is a former member of Tuscaloosa Southern Rockers The Dexateens. NPR radio in the US described he and The Glory Fires as “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock”. This is their debut album and fair reeks of the South, from Bains drawl to the slinky Skynyrd-like guitar lines. It passes in style from straight Skynyrd style Southern Rock (“Ain’t No Stranger” and “The Red Red Dirt Of Home”) right through to Country, “Reba” is a straight up Country ballad and “Roebuck Parkway” is a beautiful slice of acoustic Americana, with a hint of their Punk past sprinkled along the way. If you’re familiar with the Drive-By Truckers we’re in the same ballpark (to appropriate an American idiom) with songs about and rooted in the South and it’s problems. 

There is as much religion in these song (it’s said the title of this album stems from a mishearing of the spiritual “There Is A Balm In Gilead”, The Balm of Gilead being a Biblical medicine that can heal sinners) as there is liberal righteous ire…that feels appropriately Southern Gothic…

There Is A Bomb In Gilead - https://youtu.be/_QUPj9CBpD4