“I’m a binge writer,” says Johnson. “It’s not uncommon for me to write 20 songs in a month. Some days I just pick up the guitar and the songs kind of fall out of me. That’s when I have to capture as much as I can.”
It’s not the prolificacy of Johnson’s canon that makes the Texas songsmith exceptional, but rather his consistency. Fort Recovery, the 10th studio album in as many years by his more guitar-oriented outfit, Centro-matic, was one of the finer records of 2006, a sonic arsenal of slow-burning, cinematic alt-rock. Operation Motorcide, an EP of material pulled from those same sessions and released in March on Barcelona’s Houston Party Records, is at times Centro-matic’s long-promised return to the abrasive urgency of Redo the Stacks, the band’s 1996 debut on which Johnson played every instrument.
Tracks off Motorcide such as “Daggers Sharp Enough” and “Blood on the Floor” revel in cuts from the same wound, as razor-sharp Crazy Horse-style guitars wrap around Johnson’s volatile vocals like barbed wire. On others, such as the delicate opener “All This Fresh Mutiny,” the album leans closer to his chamber country outfit South San Gabriel’s more poignant moments.
Perhaps that’s why Johnson is planning his next release as a double album, combining the two entities in a manner that’s akin to Centro-matic’s South San Gabriel Songs/Music. “Focusing on one band makes me miss the other one,” says Johnson. “I think it makes it more inspired whenever we do get together. I want people to understand the connection between the two and the forces that drive each camp.”
Johnson recently backed Houston’s Jandek on drums for a gig in Fort Worth, toured with the Undertow Orchestra—a collective composed of Pedro the Lion’s Dave Bazan, American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel and Vic Chesnutt—and branched out into acting and painting.
“It’s a cycle,” he says. “Everything feeds into something else. I’ve got to explore it all, which, heaven forbid, might teach me a little perspective of about what this life is all about.”
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