Labels: MoonLee
Review by: Joe Callaghan
Bin fodder. Usually I keep hold of the stuff I review, as it bulks out my CD collection, but this is hitting the bottom of the bin. I don’t think a charity shop would even touch this, and there’s no one I have enough disdain for to give this to. On first glance, I was expecting something perhaps like This Machine Kills or even Submission Hold. The CD comes with a massive booklet filled with leftist essays and a bilingual lyric sheet (citing our Planet Earth as a primary influence). However, despite their radical punk rock opinions, this is mince. Atrocious, insufferable sounds. “Dancey” disco-indie drum beats, juddering, erratic guitar plucking, like if The Klaxons were mauled for their identity, and impersonated by The Towers Of London. If the vocals were in English, this could be massive. The spoiled middle class under achievers who buy their jeans with premeditated holes and stains could circle jerk over this righteous, rebellious guff. Before long, all those anti-establishment fashion accessories will be readily available in Top Shop again, just like when Avril Lavigne took the state of modern music by the scruff of the neck, and gave it a risqué public middle finger, and rightly so. She said what we were all thinking. A sterling ambassador for our radical insurgence. Records like this will have us all caring about the price of petrol again, or THE WAR! And guess what? Animal cruelty is back. You know when all those punk bands successfully chastised animal cruelty, until there was no more animal cruelty? Well, it’s back and more crueller than ever. Man, what the fuck happened? What happened to songs about skateboarding and girls? If we’re not being bombarded by sickly sweet optimism of Latterman-like “bromance’, championing the conquering of life’s smallest, most insignificant quarrels, we’ve got the overly conscious care-too-much chumps force-feeding us overly idealistic garbage. I can usually just let it lie if the songs are raging. This is just hideous. The musical equivalent of your toilet being broken by a backlog of un-flushed waste, flooding your house with a stench of 3 day old shit. But worse. Kind of.