21/09/2022
40 years ago today..
The music waiting in the black vinyl grooves of 1982's Miami is a bad voodoo spell, a love me or die ride through the human disease. Jeffrey Lee Pierce's voice and the imagery his lyrics evoke slither through your subconscious mind like a water moccasin in murky swamp water, poised to deliver a venomous bite. Miami is the second chapter in the collected works of The Gun Club, the musical cipher of singer/songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce. It remains an important and peerless work.
The cover of Miami is an oversaturated polaroid from a fever dream. The album title and cover notes are almost illegible, daring you to decipher them in an eye strain-inducing assault, lurid red font on apocalypse green. Reading the cover is like cracking an enigma code, signalling uneasy listening music. The cover photograph is disconcerting at best, like the throb of a bad migraine in the middle of summer. Two golden palm trees stretch up like an unanswered prayer against a sickly green sky. The perspective in this picture is woebegone; the conventions of photography are wildly and unsettlingly ignored. This serves as a warning shot. Rules do not apply here. The first palm tree seems to grow mysteriously out of the head of the most compelling of the three male figures in the shot, placing him as both a member of the natural world and a conduit for the supernatural world, disconnected from this mortal coil. The other two figures seem like tourists trapped in the land of the dead. The first looks heavenward and away, with a slightly disturbed, pained expression, like a stranded motorist on a deserted back road. He scans the horizon for a car and an escape plan, a way back to the familiarity and comfort of civilization. The second figure is mute and mostly obscured. His eyes also scan the horizon desperately for the dust and throttle of a viable exit. The third figure, in marked contrast, is dressed in black and seems to belong in the unnatural green light. He draws your attention like a magnetic field with a compelling, shamanic charisma. His bleached blonde hair serves as a halo, over-processed and oversaturated by the stark, beating midday sun. Dressed in black, he gazes downward in mute incantation. He hugs himself in a protective ritual embrace, his arm obscuring the lower part of his face. In contrast to the other two figures, his gaze is downward, evoking the first card in the Tarot deck, The Magician. As above, so below. A tiny full silver moon, peculiar and unsettling under the unnaturally blazing sun, appears above his head and to the right, mirroring The Magician's infinity symbol. The back cover features his black-clad arm, extending a gold crucifix as if to ward off the scorching heat and bad mojo of the midday sun, a talisman designed to attract salvation.
- Evette Braunstein, September 2022.
