Sweet shit sizzling on a hot plate—Lecherous Gaze were on some WILD junk when they made One Fifteen. It's likely their last record (although I don't know that they ever officially broke up), having been released in 2017 with zero, nada, zilch, and no hint of a possible follow-up. But god damn, how do you plan a sequel to a withering womb of howling serpents, gyrating in thrawny perversity and cosmic heatstroke the likes of which were striking and batting at our earlobes here? If you know the answer, please let Lecherous Gaze know, because I would genuinely love another record like this one. For those not in the know, The oL'e Gaze are/were an Oakland crew who exuded a particularly degenerate dispensation of sleazy rock 'n' roll in the vein of MC5 and The Dictators, with next to no use for subtlety or the conventions of savoir-vivre beyond that of your average hyena. One Fifteen is the group's third LP and is significantly refined when compared to past efforts, scraping off much of the frayed distortion that had previously defined their sound while demonstrating an elevated mastery of their instruments to boot. They go from a chicken-wire-ringed freakshow to something approaching a genuine electric-blues band at times, connecting the gutter to the delta in a similar fashion to Fear many moons past. This opening up and polishing up of their sound had the further unexpected consequence of expanding the band's repertoire into the stars, seeing them transmutate into the galaxy's most malignant prog-rock o'pioneers, incorporating crookedly cosmic synths and heady, fever-baiting, stratosphere-gauging leads into their tortured paradigm—like a version of King Crimson that has suffered an unfortunate teleporter accident on a lesser-known starcruiser and has been on a killing spree ever since. As complex and weird as everything on this record ends up being, hands down, my favorite aspect is Zaryan Zaidi's vocals. His croaking howl is so filthy and volatile that it confronts me hostilely and undermines the impressions I previously held about the limits of derangement that can be expressed by the human voice—sounding like a trash fire personified, or like he's a komodo dragon struggling to breathe in a human-skin suit. It’s wretched in a profound fashion that I can hardly articulate with standard English at my disposal. What are my favorite tracks on this record (besides all of them)? Well, for starters, there are: the radiation-baked, black-hole roadhouse rock of "Reptile Mind"; the murky and psychedelic comet-tail whip of "Thing Within"; the nitro-boosted thump and heat-death punch of “The Day the Earth Caught Fire”; and the soaring build-up and blitzing closer, "X City." Earth is a firecracker—primed to pop. Ride the burst of annihilation as you bare your fangs to the void. Take hold of thy staff and part the blue mists of oblivion to take your place amongst the spiraling gyres of the black sea of eternity, and rage until the big freeze turns the lights out. It's One Fifteen; destiny is calling—pick up the party line.
Raise your middle finger. Drape a napkin over it. Now that's the vibe. Tee Pee Records.
