James Siegfried, the white James Brown, represented the spirit of NY no-wave at its best: the desecration of the corpses of traditional rock, jazz and funk, through a new style made of a diy use of the traditional instruments. This album shows how behind the necessity to progress towards the new and the unheard-of, there was in any case the love and the respect for a golden age, withouth which no musical revolution could take place In particular, this album pays homage to the old American movie soundtracks and to the whole decadent, but at the same time exciting and adventurous world, represented by them. James himself says: “the stuff I’m doing now is very influenced by Film Noir. The new album actually has a few songs named after movies. Like, “The Set up,” “The Street with No Name.” The song “Down and Dirty” was kind of inspired by a scene in The Man With The Golden Arm where Frank Sinatra deals the cards and says, “Here they come now, down and dirty”. And “Down and Dirty” was exactly the title of the first version of this album, initially issued on CD just in Japan in 2006 for the Wind Bell and then presented again by the French Label Le Son du Maquis with the title “The Fix is in” ;finally in 2010 the collaboration between the Italian label Interbang and Maquis gave life to two different vinyl versions, an Italian and a French one (with different covers, both in limited editions of 500 copies). For this jazz and r’n’b project, two genres that he loves since his adolescence, James surrounded himself with a large group of musicians (in “Devilish Angel” there is also a cameo of Pat Place from Contortions), as to recreate a real jazz band from the ‘30s/’40s. Superb!