Vile Imbeciles - Queenie Was A Blonde / Death Jazz

Queenie Was A Blonde / Death Jazz

With the working title "Life Doesn't Get Any Better Than This. It Gets Worse" the band finished recording their follow-up to ...Ma in late 2007. The album was initially written by Huxley as material for a new project in response to a particularly unsuccessful gig in Brighton in which his guitar broke. Finally released under the name "Queenie Was A Blonde" on 14 July 2008 on Tea Vee Eye Records, the album included the addition of Caspian Rospigliosi on guitar and marked the start of Huxley's brief stint as purely a vocalist. The album title was taken from the opening line of the Joseph Moncure March poem The Wild Party. The first single from the album "Bad Ideas" was released on 18 August 2008, the promotional video being shot in the same room as the band's music video for "Slack Hands", and on the same day that Lean quit the group. The band went on to promote the album with new drummer Evan Reinhold, who had previously collaborated with Huxley in bohemian cabaret band The Dirty Cakes (featured on the BBC Three Reality TV Show Singing with the Enemy) which Huxley was a songwriter for.

The band completed their thirty minute one song mini-concept-album "Death Jazz" in late 2008; the recording features Reinhold and Lean drumming alongside each other on the work, and owing to Lean's departure mid-recording the band have never been able to perform the album live. The self-styled Death Jazz genre and concept album of the same name had been continuously referred to in interviews since the band's inception, with the concept of death jazz subsequently being used by The Guardian in an article referring to it as a new musical genre, the article ironically only briefly mentioning the band. The band have since discarded the death-jazz label, owing to some confusion around their own self-identification as a Death Jazz band. Huxley has since commented on the concept album, "The idea was that it would be a sort of homage to Ornette Coleman’s album Free Jazz. It was meant to be a sort of metal-jazz backwards thing. We recorded it anyway, but Death Jazz is probably not the best term for it: it’s more free post-rock or something like that." On the 16th of March 2009 the band released the mini album as a B-side to the double A-side single "Jennifer"/"Tramp", both A-side tracks being taken from the "Queenie Was a Blonde" album. The album was reviewed by the NME who noted "Brighton four-piece Vile Imbeciles show scant regard for the traditions of the recorded format" in their decision to release an album as a B-side to a single and gave the album 8 out of 10 stating the work was "the manifestation of a magnificent perversion". The videos to both A-side singles were shot on location in the disused bank Reinhold was living in, and in which the band would then go on to build a studio in to record their next album.