Labels: La Vida Es Un Mus
Review by: Alex Deller
Been sitting on this one for a while, not being 100% sure what to say about it. Is it a good record? Yeah, f’sure. That’s not the problem. It’s how to describe it. Starts with chirruping birds and mysterious clanks but, once unleashed, is a mixture of rangy punk rock fire and drug-brained art haze. Like someone had told a bunch of aspirant, adventurous d-beaters what early Sonic Youth sounded like then asked them to have a go at recreating it without actually letting ’em hear the records. The guiding force seems to be the bass, which chunters out big, gloopy grooves that stride about like they bloody own the place. While this gives things a semblance of structure and normality the drums go haywire, vocals spontaneously combust and the guitars veer between grinding out big anthemic chords and abstract patterns which’re scraped directly onto the insides of your eyelids. Whether this will find favour with folks whose jackets are held together entirely by Disclose patches is, perhaps, doubtful. What isn’t is that tracks like ‘No Hi Ha Esperance’ and ‘Runes, Decadència’ are bloody great and that anyone into the weirder, wilder side of punk will be doing themselves a massive ruddy disservice if they don’t at least check this one out.