Like Michael Moorcock's bibliography or the vaulting scope of human experience itself, Billy Childish's musical output is unknowably vast and impossibly labyrinthine every time digging deeper into that dirt-simple rock and roll. This year his latest project, The Spartan Dreggs, put out three fucking full-length LPs, THREE! This is pretty much business as usual for Childish, basic but literate punk stomps, though its got a slightly more spindly sound to it in the vocals from Neil Palmer, drawing to mind a more vulnerable air than the sneer of a lot of Childish's oeuvre the Spartan Dreggs' highlights include running an AE Housman poem through that spare garage-spark on A Shropshire Lad, penning sad songs about modernist Swiss writer Robert Walser on The Ballad of Robert Walser, wailing plaintively on Grimpen Mire, a five-minute rumbling indie-punk takeback of the word 'epic' on the Homeric Headlong Fly the Achaeans.
