- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I first met Shmootzi the Clod in the back room of Cafe Racer. I’d noticed him wearing a vest with a picture of William S. Burroughs on it, and we got to talking about the author. When I found out that his band, God’s Favorite Beefcake, was playing there later that night, I decided to stick around and check them out.
An hour later, I was watching Shmootzi sing like a man possessed, a wide-eyed marionette in the lap of some spirit whose torso filled the stage but whose lower extremities remained below – a djinn that the band kept in thrall with Katie Weller’s haunting musical saw and Raccoon’s violin. Meanwhile, the rhythm of Jill Zirkle on spoons and Meshuguna Joe’s bullgoose fiddle drove them onward, as they plunged through songs of fires and trainwrecks that nonetheless conjure up a sense of beauty growing within the doom.
God’s Favorite Beefcake played a dark locomotive blues, a soot-stained, stoke-the-devil’s-engine-and-let-the-whistle-blow blues, a cackling march towards oblivion fueled by Doctor Diggety’s harmonica, and permeated by a sense of gleeful apocalypse – like songs sung round a campfire, but this time it’s the ghosts’ turn to tell stories about you. The performance had a dark humor reminiscent of Richard Elfman’s bizarre cinematic masterpiece, The Forbidden Zone, in its carnal, carnival feel. Shmootzi told dirty jokes between songs, and even hammered a nail into his face. I was also reminded a bit of the gritty, subterranean surrealism of Tom Waits’ early ’90s material.¹
I was hooked. It had been a long time since I’d heard music that grabbed me by the throat like that. Since then, I’ve tried to catch them as often as I can – something that’s not too hard to do, as they play nearly every Thursday at Cafe Racer.
After having seen them so many times, I was pleased that they recently released an album of studio material. Beautiful Trainwreck captures much of the sound of their live show, but with  a slightly calmer, more understated feel to it, which helps the more tender side of the material come out, especially on songs like “Hello G’Bye” and “Home.” For despite God’s Favorite Beefcake’s apocalyptic clangor, there is a sentimental, even melancholy side to their music, which you can hear in lines like, “tell me a story about happier days, before the world became wild and crazed.”
Like a good Russian novel, Beautiful Trainwreck runs the gamut of emotions, sometimes juggling several at once. It’s a nice reprieve from this post-Real World world, with its glut of one-trick ponies, and caricatures on the airwaves.
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1. I hesitate to make this comparison, due to the spate of individuals who seem to think that their moderately heavy drinking authorizes them to present themselves as some sort of Tom Waits or Charles Bukowski clone.