Indie music legend, the inimitable hell raiser Tex Perkins (who fronted the Australian rock band The Cruel Sea and also performed with the Beasts of Bourbon, Thug, James Baker Experience, The Butcher Shop, Salamander Jim, and Tex, Don and Charlie) has just released the achingly beautiful track ‘Brand New Man’ with his band The Fat Rubber Band.
Perkins’s voice is like a soft velvet cloak dragged through a barbed wire fence, imbued with long, late nights and gallons of whiskey, smoke and regret. In ‘Brand New Man’, it is further plunged into a splendorous melancholy, deliciously pained and broken with an air of a faded, jaded forgotten singer in some red velvet outer Las Vegas dive peering through a smoky fugue. Behind him, the Fat Rubber Band pours all of its heart into the rambling, shambling soundtrack that prowls and slides around like a creature on an ice rink.
Perkins says of the track:
The song just came about so effortlessly that we were immediately inspired to keep writing. And through that a whole album has appeared and personally I feel like it’s a real high point for me looking back at my whole career. When songs flow, it’s not a grind, it’s a feeling of being in the right place and time. Brand New Man was the start of that and is now so important to us. It’s the song that lights up audiences when Matt and I perform it with or without the Fat Rubber Band. It just had to be the first single from the new album.
The entire track just oozes with a brittle, stately atmosphere:
‘Brand New Man’ is out everywhere today and comes off Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band’s newly announced album ‘Other World’ which will be released in 2023 via Source Music. In the meantime, you can catch the band live in November – details below.
