The Martha's Vineyard Ferries – She's A F**king Angel (From F**king Heaven)
Shellac and Codeine luminaries’ expletive-laden celestial hook-up.
The Martha’s Vineyard Ferries comprise Bob Weston (above right: Shellac, Mission of Burma), Chris Brokaw (centre: Come, Codeine) and Elisha Wiesner (left: Kahoots), a trio of US alt.rock journeymen bought together via the various strands of the US underground and a shared joke about imaginary band names made flesh in 2010 on an EP, In The Pond, and now an album called (geographical gag ahoy!) Mass. Grave, from which this Brokaw-penned serrated love song comes. A native of Martha’s Vineyard, Elisha Wiesner met Chris Brokaw in 2004 when Chris opened for Elisha’s band Kahoots at a gig on the island. While Bob Weston first met Elisha when he lent his acknowledged recording skills to a session by Elisha’s band in Boston. Bob went on to help Elisha build a home-studio on Martha’s Vineyard, while in return Elisha set up a gig on the island for Shellac. And if that sounds about as incongruous as booking CRASS to play a Rotary Club dinner in Surrey, apparently it isn’t. Bob confesses to have “Really fallen in love with the local year-round community.” While Chris also “Fell in love with the whole scene there.” So their band grew from a shared affection for the island whose only transport link gave them its name.
“Minor Threat crossed with Eight Miles High by The Byrds” is how Elisha has described the band’s sound and this song’s inspired fusion of vivid tunefulness and distorted rumble evokes Hüsker Dü’s emotionally charged gallop through that same Byrds song, or Dinosaur Jr.’s earsplitting melodic sweetness.
“I had sex with the devil and now I’m seeing double,” Brokaw declaims. “She’s a f**king angel on every kind of level.” It’s a sexually charged, emotional outpouring on a song that clearly believes in both the redemptive possibilities of love and the power of the double expletive: while one is merely tawdry, two are funny.
Hear the track in its uncensored glory here:
