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Dr. Peter Venkman : So what? I guess they just don’t make them like they used to.

Dr. Raymond Stantz : [impatiently slaps Peter on the forehead]  No! Nobody *ever* made them like this! I mean, the architect was either a certified genius, or an authentic wacko!

Ghostbusters (1984)

By now you either know the story of this hookup or you probably don’t care, but TLDR: Peter Buck buys a Luke Haines Lou Reed painting. They make an album by email. They try to tour it. COVID hits. By the time they eventually get to play a load of sold-out UK shows, they’ve already written and recorded album #2. Here it is.

Beat Poetry For Survivalists was a shortish, sharpish wallop of a rock record, albeit a gloriously scuzzy and singular one. On its heels came the solo Luke Haines in… Setting The Dogs On The Post-Punk Postman, probably Haines’s straightest record in a decade or so.

Now comes the Haines and Buck reunion. Maybe working with someone who’s sold 90 million albums is beginning to rub off on Luke. After all, with ‘Sunstroke’ and ‘Won’t Get Out Of Bed’, All The Kids Are Super Bummed Out boasts two of the most New Wave-y songs he’s recorded for ages. Maybe Luke Haines is going trad?

Yeah, you know that’s not going to happen any time soon. Where Beat Poetry wrapped up its weirdo manifesto in a neat, punchy package, Bummed Out has all its loose threads hanging out all over the place. Not just hanging out. Actually being gleefully pulled and frayed every which way over its 17 songs and two CDs. Nobody ever made them like this!

Haines’s inimitable lyrical dialect (“fuck this for a game of soldiers” “not on your nelly”, “snooker crazy and snooker loopy” ) remains utterly undimmed by the company of Buck and his two regular accomplices Scott McCaughey (bass) and Linda Pitmon (drums).

Sure, the terrace glam riot of ‘Psychedelic Sitar Casual’, gloomy occultist rock of ‘The British Army on LSD’, Glitterband strut of ‘Subterranean Earth Stomp’ and end-of-the-world prog punk ‘The Commies Are Coming’ (written long before the current unpleasantness) would have all fit nicely on the first album. But in parts and in especially in whole, this is a much messier, weirder record.

That’s especially and obviously true of ‘Exit Space (All The Kids Are Super Bummed Out)’. A slowed-down lament for our times powered by sirens, monkey noises, choral samples and squelchy synths, it’s a seven-minute plus epic that acts as the centrepiece for this freaked out masterpiece. Even the less extreme examples littering this double album find Haines and Buck stretching their musical limbs much more this time around, though.

The sparse Lennony noodling of ‘And We Will’, the unconventional dynamics and instruments on ‘Iranian Embassy Siege’ and ‘Diary of a Crap Artist’. The insistent keyboard stabs and squiggling noises spinning around on ’45 Revolutions’. This is consistently disturbing, funny (in every sense) listening.

We live in psychedelic times, and not the good type. Just switch on the news. Better still, don’t. Blast this unsettling soundtrack to this fucked up moment we’re trudging through instead.

Luke Haines & Peter Buck – All The Kids Are Super Bummed Out is available now via Cherry Red