The Church of Simultaneous Existence

Ed Kuepper reformed The Aints! – now with exclamation mark – to revisit his songs from the first three albums by The Saints ((I’m) Stranded, Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds). While touring with The Aints!, Kuepper started to introduce unrecorded songs written alongside those albums, and The Church Of Simultaneous Existence is a studio recording of that material, which Kuepper called a “hypothetical fourth Saints album”. He’d grappled with a few of these songs before – “Red Aces” also appears on The Aints’ 1992 album Autocannibalism, and “Winter’s Way” turned up on the Laughing Clowns’ Ghosts Of An Ideal Wife, back in 1985. This line-up of The Aints! is particularly limber, and yet again, it’s a thrill to hear Kuepper fully amplified and roaring from the speaker cabinets. And it captures plenty of the spirit of the second and third Saints albums in particular – churlish slabs of guitar noise butting heads with R&B brass and a brutally effective rhythm section.