Sometimes there is just a slab of noise without any noticeable trickery: Petrified Spirits is a tribal rallying call, an exploratory drill for the sort of Psychicke energy lines that lie deep beneath the surface of Albion. Or a bloody atonal racket. It’s equally inspiring and revolting.
Sometimes there is just a slab of noise without any noticeable trickery: Petrified Spirits is a tribal rallying call, an exploratory drill for the sort of Psychicke energy lines that lie deep beneath the surface of Albion. Or a bloody atonal racket. It’s equally inspiring and revolting.
Doubleedgedscissor.bandcamp.com
I’m in danger of sounding like some teenager on Ritalin but this is a truly exciting release. I absolutely fucking love this band and what they do. And yes you will accuse me of posing; I’m sure, but fine. It’s a record of glorious, unadulterated noise; great swathes of disconnected sounds do battle in a fevered way, replete with the sort of energy invested into pre-pubescent dreams.
Listening to this LP, I keep getting a mental image of some ridiculous UR-hippy tank made of scrap metal, crawling over the country and setting itself up on the village greensward, or in the restored mid Victorian terrace, annoying all with its sheer ungainly, ill-fitting, unguent presence. Look at the track titles and tell me that this isn’t the vanguard of some lunatic army: Mangled Limbs, Petrified Spirits, Serious Idiots, Church of Abortion, Fuq England Up, Plague of Locusts. This is “medieval shit”, brothers and sisters; this would have been beloved of warrior kings and the Viking bishops of York.
Sometimes there is just a slab of noise without any noticeable trickery: Petrified Spirits is a tribal rallying call, an exploratory drill for the sort of Psychicke energy lines that lie deep beneath the surface of Albion. Or a bloody atonal racket. It’s equally inspiring and revolting. The important thing is that this is the sort of noise that isn’t that intellectual – though I’m sure lots of counter cultural theses will doubtless be based on music like this. It’s created more from the hip than from the rarefied towers of academe. You get the feeling that they work it out as they go along. With that in mind, this record can lay claim to being one of the true spiritual inheritors of the Faust Tapes, another over intellectualised rock record.
This sounds like or what was in the head of a footsoldier at Bosworth fields – some incoherent Caliban-eque grunting yob, pissing on your chips, ringing up phone ins to complain about Ronaldo, some malcontent 12 year old dreaming of making and displaying every model of every tank from the Second World War. Now and again there’s a structure that jumps out at you as a reminder that this is music. Mangled Limbs has a touch of melody: a piano stab of a chord change sets up a weird soul mash which works brilliantly.
Briliant, one of the LPs of the year.