The Groundhogs stretched their success with their next album -- Split. This album kept up with the same musical trajectory previous work has started, but this time focused on Schizophrenia as its main theme. The sound is a bit more grungy and murky, springing to life fantastic Fuzz guitar. The four tracks on side 1 are just numbered 1-4 and really invoke the concept which Split sets to create while the uptempto "Cherry Red" of side 2 became the band's biggest hit ever. This album went into the Top 10 as well. R. ChelledIn the post-Hendrix fallout of the aimless, wandering early '70s, only the Groundhogs harnessed the fury of lost '60s Dream idealism in order to capture on record their very own pre-punk onslaught. Many of the British groups such as Juicy Lucy and Sandoz turned to the post-blues of Zappa and Beefheart for inspiration, but nowadays the results sound as contrived as their mentors; overly intellectual and, ultimately, stridently un-British. London squats of 1971 resounded to the fakery of bogus Delta blues singers, as though only a desert twang could infuse rock'n'roll with a truthful alienation. But, like the obscure genius of London's short-lived Third World War, Tony McPhee's Groundhogs proved that this need not be the case at all, and Split is the album that provided the main body of evidence. This album of paranoid delusion and post-drug trauma was seen by its author as a straight account of a real event. As he said at the time: "I seemed to lose my entire personality … I never talked to anyone, because nothing seemed to be worth saying … I don't reach any conclusions - it's just … what happened, that's all." Both musically and lyrically, Split speaks for a lost time, a nomad time when ideals took to the hoof and musicians stayed on the road rather than confront the fact that the '60s 'war' had been lost.
Unlike other contemporary bands, economy of notes was not part of the Groundhogs agenda. On Split, more than any other Groundhogs album, they played in a shamanic whirling that shattered and scattered the beat around in several directions at once. The frenzied drumming of Ken Pustelnik reduced the kit to the role of moronic streetgang defenseless against one lone Kung Fu hero. Stun-guitars wah-wah'd and ricochet'd at random against concrete walls, leaving passers by mortally wounded but deliriously happy. Even Pete Cruickshank's bass, that one remaining anchor, was no anchor at all, but a freebass undermining the entire structure. As McPhee explained in a Zigzag interview of the time:
"[Ken] just wallops everything in sight and sometimes I lose him completely. Like I often come back in during a solo and can't work out where he is - so I just have to play a note and let it feed back until I can find my way back in. And Pete doesn't help either, because he's all over the place and he follows me rather than Ken … so when we fall apart, we really fall apart."
The brutal honesty of this quote showcases Tony McPhee's determination to follow his muse to the end. His singing is confused and compassionate, dazed and un-macho at a time of hoot'n'holler chest beating. And despite the wonder-fuelled strengths of Split's first side, each song is reduced to the anonymity of mere numbers: "Split 1", "Split 2", "Split 3" and "Split 4". Yet each is complete and each is anything but anonymous. The furious "Split 1" careers through its description of McPhee's "suicidal derangement" as he termed it with murderous bass and wah guitar interplaying. "Split 2" de-tunes itself into awesome/awful life with a chasm guitar riff that snare shatters into a tearing riff account of McPhee leaping out of bed in black hole terror, before the floor of the room gives way and he ends: "I must get help before I go insane". Ghost Hammond organ chords punctuate the ends of this piece. Song 3 is a chiming clean bell-tone blues which breaks off into formidable noise rock and tears the roof of the sucker, before "Split 4" sees the singer get "down on his knees and pray to the sun". The heathen one-chord flailing of this song is occasionally interrupted by more squeezy wah, but the highway blues riffs and car crash guitars see the track open out into a wide blue horizon'd escape, before McPhee's distorto-feedback bursts into flames like Barry Newman's Dodge Challenger at the end of Vanishing Point.
Side Two opens with their most famous song of all: "Cherry Red". Another sonic clatterwail in the Groundhogs' more-is-more/hit-everything methodology, the propellant bass and plate-spinning cymbals undermine ernie-ernie guitars and a vocal, which shifts from alpha male to soul castrato. McPhee's guitars swallow the rhythm section whole, then he undermines us all by becoming his own female backing singer.
The dark ages ballad that is "A Year in the Life" grubs around in the soil like low church bell-ringers on vacation from Black Sabbath's first album sleeve. Invention and dignity and mystery. "Junkman" is insane. A ramshackle Fall-type Steptoe & Sonic boom of a song, which veers into staccato Guru Guru stop-start, before collapsing into freeform slide-toilet bowl FX guitar for several minutes. Then we hit the last song of all, a blues standard called "Groundhog Blues", approached with the same attitude that inhabited their Blues Obituary album. Drums are here reduced to cardboard box/frontporch patterstomp like Beefheart's "China Pig", while McPhee's blues is a sorrow-drowning greysky of seagull guitars. Split falls to the ground in a massively underplayed style - as though Evel Knievel had chosen to mount a unicycle for the three-minute encore of his hour-long 1000cc show. That's confidence. -- J. Cope
The fourth Groundhogs album is probably their heaviest -- not necessarily measured by the lowing of their low end, but in terms of the mood and subject matter. McPhee became a troubled figure between the previous album and this one -- insular to the point of silence. "My mind and body are two things, not one," from 'Split: Part Three' (the first side of the LP was a four-part title track) is perhaps the crucial lyric in what amounts to a damn notepad of couch confessions. The doomy intro to 'Split: Part Three' shares consecrated ground with 'Black Sabbath', the song, and musically you get the impression the lads might have seen some potential in their high drama; likewise, the disassembled blues of Captain Beefheart. The arrangements get ever more tricksy over these 40 minutes or so, the slide guitar outbursts more wailing -- 'Split: Part Four' exemplifies this even before the free-rock guitar detonation at the end. (It also has a verse where McPhee attempts to hedge his bets by adhering to Islam and Christianity at the same time.)
'Cherry Red', with which Split side two kicks off, is one of those songs that you probably know better than you think you do. It isn't empirically obvious why it's become their best known song, but there's definitely something to be said for getting a bit aled up and nodding, nodding dog-like, to a cyclical bassline which pays no attention to the guitar doing its wrecking ball act over the top. 'A Year In The Life' (was everything that sounded a bit like a Beatles songtitle assumed to be a Beatles reference at the time, I wonder to no-one in particular?) is more of that prototypical Sabbathian gloomery; 'Junkman' is a genuinely weird shift between pensive jangle and antisocial FX buggery which Julian Cope has accurately described as "like the flushing of an electric toilet". Their old mucker John Lee Hooker is hat-tipped at the end via a wheeze through his 'Groundhog Blues', the source of their name. It's faithful but fugly, sounding uncomfortably close and distorted; if written music was the written word, this would be full of missed apostrophes and unnecessary full stops. A fitting enough ending for an album that consistently prickles you one way or another. -- Noel Gardner, The Quietus
― Algerian Goalkeeper, Thursday, 28 March 2013 18:40 (eleven years ago) link