“BRIGHTON IS A CITY. WITHOUT SONG,” spits a misshapen millennial (and Brightonian) Elvis, unceremoniously frothing at the mouth and riding serpents of distortion off the South Coast, scorching marks across the nipple-troublingly-cold British waters. And, y’know, on this occasion the boy may have a point. Other local company (British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade, etc) excepted of course. There is little evidence on here for anything as ‘institutionalised’ or ‘constrained’ as a ‘song’. Yeah, so there’s something bearing the hallmarks of a chorus here and yes alright there’s a hook there, only one track (screeching album conclusion ‘Presidential Wave’) tops the three-minute mark too. But it’d help if you thought of these more as blitzes. Something that much more physical, something that hurts just a little. Something that might leave a scar. And there are places you can pay unreasonable hourly rates for this sort of treatment.
People have made loud records, intense records, angry records and desperate records, but you haven’t heard a record quite like this for a very long time indeed. It’s a scuzz punk bout of metal epilepsy, it’s goth gloom dismembered under strobes, foot-to-the-floor car-jack extremity with a pulse driven by a strong heart. Whilst pumped up to the eyeballs on a metric ton of hallucinogens. It’s exhilarating, disorientating, confusing and often difficult to swallow. So the caked up demon on your shoulder yells TRY HARDER, and you do. And it’s not like it doesn’t have substance to help down the bricks of sound and blasts of light that knock you sideways. It’s the shocking conviction that practically grabs you from your shitty speakers and insists this isn’t just a loud record, but an essential one.
The depth of influence far outweighs that of most of their garage contemporaries, if you can even call them that, in that it’s not just 2 parts Ramone, 3 parts Iggy, 1 part New Wave wild card. The relative pop tune ‘Celebrate Your Mother’ and album epitaph ‘Psychosis Safari’, kick and scream like The Cramps in the dock, with Lemmy standing as prosecution witness. ‘Fish Fingers’ thuds up on your blindside like Al Jourgensen’s industrial titans Ministry hurling their malfunctioning electronics out the driver’s window. ‘Chicken’ and ‘Team Meat’, and most of the album for that matter, drag in the severe zombified stupour of Nick Cave’s Birthday Party, unhook the catch and release the madness out into the night in most directions. In many ways they sound like everything you’ve ever heard, together in one place, with bloodshot eyes and a guilty grin. Put simply, you will not hear a record like this again, until they decide to make another one.