The Human Elephant has been knocking about for a while now playing some bigger shows too and gaining quite a bit of attention so it’s time for a cosy Friday night at Madame Claude with some top quality lo-fi tunes like this one, You Deserve To Die from his latest record White Thunder:
This is what one reviewer had to say about White Thunder:
is a basso ode defending the lawful rights of dive-bar ironists and lo-fi aficionados around the world. Despite its imperfections, “White Thunder” is a simple, no-bones singer/songwriter jaunt into the doleful musical wake left by Joy Division and other, less dour navel-gazers.
Here’s the opening song from the album too, a toe-tapping mastpiece, 1726:
John Edward Donald grew up in the suburbs of Chicago during the seventies as a child of a divorce. He was given a guitar as a Christmas gift under the advice of one of his six older brothers when 9 years old and was schooled, as typical in Chicago, in blues guitar, then country until he was introduced to Joy Divison through a cassette tape given by a friend. The introduction to the music of Joy Di…vision, which was at that time not considered “Punk“ or “Post-Punk“ but a type of proto-Gothic and later other industrial/post-industrial groups such as Current 93, Death in June, and especially the literary talent of Edward Ka-Spel of Legendary Pink Dots brought about a change in John Edward Donald’s style. After embarking on an attempt with some other schoolmates to play the new sort of “hardcore“ commonly played by trios such as Distorted Pony which placed J. Donald on vocals and guitar he intuitively moved more and more into acoustic-based songwriting, using a four-track to record his sketches while living from eighteen on in the city of Chicago.
