If you could set the double-barrelled pop-rifle to Splattergun please, Captain, and load it with nails. Plenty of ‘em too. I thank you. SPLAT 1! Sharp no-shit white-is-white drums, overloaded rhyming, garbled excess – *stop for a breath* – catch-me-if-you-can guitar, horns, shouting! Yes! It’s like Ash taking off The Strokes’ arms with chainsaws in a growing, ripe-for-popping bubblegum bubble, blowing into Less Than Jake’s backyard, exploding on the barbeque and killing all in attendance. Good.
SPLAT 2! White hot rhythms, broken glass guitars, reduced melodies, screaming, destruction, passion, da-da-da-das! Yeah! It’s like At The Drive In pulling the fetid, holey carpet from beneath Ikara Colt’s wobbly legs and falling into a vat of syrup. SPLAT 3! Cascading Casio keyboards, snow falling cymbals, on your back ambience, split-end harmonies! Mmmm. It’s Idlewild monging out with Mercury Rev, trapped inside a calculator, Bob Mould doing the calculations.
3 songs in (‘We Are The Solution’, ‘Vaulting Us’ and ‘Eisley Vs The Mountain’ respectively) and you get the idea. It’s all over the derelict shop, wallpaper peeling off the walls, but it feel like home. Further on you’ll get Medium 21 merging into Mogwai on the heavy-hearted and intense ‘Medication’, The Senseless Things serenading S*M*A*S*H on ‘Nice Shootin Tex’ and The Cooper Temple Clause getting a needed strip-down on ‘The Sparkly One’. And yet still there’s more. It doesn’t really know what it is. But whatever, it just is. And it’s a bit of an epic.