This past Friday, we premiered the Terry Turtle song, “I Wish She Loved Me,” covered by Billy Brett (Buck Gooter), and Ships In The Night. It’s a tender jam from the soul, and, as such, could not be a better representation of Turtle’s big heart, and his legacy of love. It almost made you forget that there was a wild, loud side to Buck Gooter—perhaps one more embodied by Brett, but the two were equals in just about everything. On the coattails of the quiet and gentle, Brett’s other band, Candidate Demo, rides raucous and enraged, with, “Captive Bolt,” the opening track of their new album God Jokes. Don’t get me wrong—there is, and always was, plenty of rage in the songs of Buck Gooter, but here we are presented with an unadulterated, unprecedented frenzy.
A flurry of kick drum hurdles forward, a trojan horse kicking down the city gates, even as the gears are in motion to open them. NOT QUICKLY ENOUGH, it immediately proclaims. And with an inconceivable eruption, heavily distorted guitar carries Brett’s searing howl right through your doorstep, inescapable and destructive beyond reconciliation. “The lamb lives its whole life / Afraid of the wolf,” he deplores. “But is slaughtered by the shepherd.” The reckoning time is now. The whole thing is steady and melodic and wrathful. The fuzz-thickened ruthlessness of it all, gives way to an interlude of bass and airy, wondrous guitar, a chance to catch your breath. But as you regain your bearings, so, too, does the dragon, the beast, what have you. Brett is rejuvenated to hurl his fire over you and everything you know, until the final pillar is felled, and the lingering feedback rings out like the settling of endless ash, at the song’s end.