Insecure Men – LA Pool Blues
Insecure Men are back with “LA Pool Blues”, the first single from a new EP called The Cream Of England, out on Fat Possum Records. Saul Adamczewski, who also plays in Fat White Family, leads the project, and the song’s origin story is exactly as crazy as you’d hope. By his own admission, he took too much acid at a pool party in the Hollywood hills and became convinced he was the actual devil. He tried to psychically will Fat White Family bandmate Lias Saoudi and his new wife into leaving by glaring at them. They left. Adamczewski then looked out over LA certain he was Satan. He is, he clarifies, not.
That absurd premise sits underneath a song that goes somewhere much darker than the setup suggests. It runs through a series of deaths at different ages, laying out tragedy after tragedy in a flat, cataloguing way, with the recurring line “people talk” needling at how casually the world processes other people’s grief. The last turn, a seven-year-old with leukemia and parents describing a heaven they don’t believe in, is where the song stops being a joke about a bad trip and lands as something else entirely.
The arrangement leans cinematic and gothic without tipping into theatrics, which is the balance Adamczewski has always been good at, that pull between something ornate and something genuinely bleak. The EP runs four tracks, with Lias Saoudi contributing lyrics to one of them, “All The Things That Fell Off The Mountain”. “LA Pool Blues” is out digitally now, but the rest of the record stays vinyl-only, available at the band’s upcoming UK shows.
