Nikki Sudden, who died last March, was a velvet-draped, junk-sick dandy with a quixotic loyalty to rock ’n’ roll. As a kitchen-sink knockoff of Johnny Thunders and Keith Richards, he seemed to view his own obsolescence with a combination of humour and indifference, knowing that he couldn’t help himself anyway. He was set apart by an obsession with obscure European history, not to mention a knack for hooks that made even the shabbiest of his records worth hearing. It’s a gift that stretched all the way back to his work with Swell Maps, the hipster-sanctioned art punks he fronted while still a teenager in the ’70s. On The Truth Doesn’t Matter, “Jet Star Groove” is the track that evokes those days the best, with its weird run of modulations into the chorus. Sudden also gives us his inimitable take on dance music with “Seven Miles” and “Draggin’ Me Down”, though the band still keeps a foot, actually, both feet in the garage. “Nothing Left” is his mutant stab at rockabilly, “Black Tar” is a gruesome and primitive appraisal of the substance that finally did him in, and “Green Shield Stamps” is where Sudden gives himself over to some gratuitous nostalgia. This unabashedly sentimental autobiography would verge on cloying if Sudden hadn’t been such a lovable and unlikely creature, and in this context—his last and best album—it’ll put a big lump in the throats of a small but fervent band of believers.

Georgia Straight, November 2006