Darcy Clay - Jesus I Was Evil (1997)

A friend showed me wild man Darcy Clay a couple days ago and I can't get enough. His sound is pretty varied between songs but the title track is somewhere between R. Stevie Moore at his zaniest and the Beatles' Helter Skelter, with the driest guitar tone you've ever heard.

There isn't much info about him online, but from what I can tell Clay was active in the mid 90's in New Zealand and his two favorite bands were Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr.. He only released one record during his lifetime -- the six-song EP "Jesus I Was Evil" -- complete with brilliant title track above and a now-infamous cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene", before tragically killing himself in 1997 at the age of 26. He was scheduled to perform at a suicide prevention and awareness event just a month before he died.

Posthumously, a live album was released in 2002 of one of supposedly only five public performances he ever played (in this case opening for the band Blur). There's a charming moment when he introduces his first song, "English Rose", announcing to the crowd that he wrote the tune "just a couple weeks ago" and then proceeding to play through Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" basically verbatim.

There's a compilation of his six-song EP and said live performance available as one album on Spotify below.

Listen on Spotify:
Darcy Clay - Jesus I Was Evil (2002)