New York Times
24th September 1986
by Jon Pareles

The Blue Messiahs Raise A Ruckus

"It came out of nowhere, just like lightning hitting a plane," Bill Carter sings on the Screaming Blue Messiahs' debut album, 'Gun-Shy' (Elektra). That might describe the band itself, which will perform Saturday at the Ritz (119 East 11th Street), as well as 'Gun-Shy', one of the year's most powerful – and raucous – major-label albums, blunt and muscular and implacable. With twanging, squealing guitars and walloping drums, 'Gun-Shy' comes on like a pickup truck full of Furies.

The Messiahs' songs, written by the guitarist-singer Bill Carter, hurl fragmented phrases and enraged shouts; now and then, there's an echo of the Rolling Stones, the Clash or Link Wray, but most of the music has its own careening momentum. In the opening 'Wild Blue Yonder', Mr. Carter announces, "All the things that I can see are breaking up around me", and he goes on to demonstrate. At their more coherent moments, the songs are about "busting loose", seemingly just ahead of some cataclysm; elsewhere, they are just plain wild-eyed.

"I'm a reasonable person," the soft-spoken Mr. Carter said the other day. "But these things have to come out of somewhere, and it's a harmless way of getting that sort of stuff out. There are far more sinister forms of the use of the media, like TV news."

Along with a burgeoning movement of grassroots American bands, the Screaming Blue Messiahs have taken raw blues and country guitar licks as ammunition against the well-groomed, synthesizer-trimmed pop that dominates the airwaves. On 'Gun-Shy', the band pays tribute to the country singer Hank Williams with a rough-hewn, snarling version of 'You Gotta Change'.

"I know the kind of feel I like: that outback feel," Mr. Carter said. "I think our music has a bit of edge; otherwise, it wouldn't be worth it to be in the band. So much of the music is levelled out now, to be the acceptable face of rock-and-roll. It used to be rebellious to be in a rock band, but these days, it's probably more dangerous to be an accountant."

Mr. Carter, like many other innovative English rock musicians, is an art school graduate. He used to make "big, screen-print paintings, pictures of the country, everyday things," he said. "I don't know if they had much to do with my music, but I always tried to make them quite hard and exciting and atmospheric."

He started the Screaming Blue Messiahs after the break-up of his last band, Motor Boys Motor – a name that reveals his obsession with driving. "I've spent spent every penny that I've had in the past three years on my car, an old Camaro," he said., "fixing it up and fuelling it. I think driving is the last form of freedom – I'm surprised the government lets you drive at all."

The sound of the Screaming Blue Messiahs, he said, just grew. "All my songs start off really quiet. They all start off like country ballads, and then I take them to the band – and they ruin them."