The Foghorns are not a folk band. Lead Foghorn Bart Cameron may have some folk-ish tendencies – a deft way with common language and a limited set of chord progressions, a propensity for storytelling and sticking it to the man – but the Foghorns are a rock band through and through, and a damn good one. I have rarely seen Bart play an acoustic guitar, and earplugs are usually a good idea when catching the full band live. There’s a good deal of salty language involved. Guitar solos – and the occasional bass clarinet solo – are featured. And yet what we have here is another side of the Foghorns, and a decidedly folky one. Bart’s dusted off the acoustic, there are no drums, and – is that a fiddle I hear? Something must be riling up our friend if he’s feeling the need to go full folk here. (Let me just say: I love me some riled-up Bart Cameron.) And that something is, well, the art world – or at least the headline-grabbing, multimillion-dollar-auctioning, faux-provocative, self-satisfied world of the likes of Jeff Koons and Charles Saatchi. Prepare yourself for a full-blown, oral assault on the ludicrous system the ruling class has set up for the “appreciation” (and I do mean that in the fiscal sense) of “art,” with all the righteousness and wit of Woody Guthrie when he wasn’t on the government’s dime. And, as Bart notes, “This was somehow before Jeff fucking Koons sold another shitty fucking sculpture, this time for 95 million.” I usually don’t turn over track reviews to the artist in question, but what the hell, I’m just handing Bart the mic on this one: “For an age deeply in need of introspection, insight and meaning, we’ve got Koons. Fuck. See all other corporate art in all other genres for similar fuck this fucking shit.”
Fuck this fucking shit, indeed. But all hail the Foghorns.