Some bands have eloquent press sheets with huge descriptive passages that practically sing from the page. Lyrical and evocative, they draw you into another world and invite you to rest your weary bones in a place free from the everyday stress of modern life. Other bands, however, have song titles that spit in your face and threaten you with ABH. Bands like Dead Arms, for example, who follow in the footsteps of unconventional noiseniks The Jesus Lizard, gleefully making their music an exhilarating endurance test in the process. It’s not big, it’s not pretty (it might be clever, it’s kinda hard to tell), but it sure will leave you a sweating, hapless wreck as the band dispatch ten songs in a mere twenty-five minutes.
Summoning the spirit of Sonic Youth, the atonal churn of grandad hates you is anchored by a throbbing, distorted bass of McLusky-esque proportions. As stabbing and unpleasant as the title implies, it’s a snotty, antagonistic punk rock nightmare wrapped up in art-rock clothing and it captures the febrile atmosphere of modern-day Britain with a searing sarcasm that recalls John Lydon at his establishment-baiting peak. Barely pausing to draw breath, the band barrel straight into Biased Broadcasting Corporation, a garage-thrash attack played with finger-ripping ferocity. Recently-released single Apocalypse Yow sneakily borrows a riff from John Hudson’s (Faith No More) book of tricks, descending into a swirling maelstrom of treble-heavy cymbal wash and clattering noise. The pace does slow, a touch, for the feedback-strewn surf-punk of Tom Hanks, an unlikely celebrity choice for such blazing sonic scree, before give me shelter rises from the venerable wreckage to smash the unsuspecting listener upside the head with a bottle of Newky Brown.
With half the album dispatched and the listener reeling like a drunk at a party, the typically-atypically-titled drunk bananas sounds like the noise your dad and his mates would make in the garage at 4 a.m. having spent the night smoking joints and listening to Fugazi records played at the wrong speed. Barely coherent, that it doesn’t fall in on itself is a minor miracle, but the band make it to the end and then slam into the nightmarish Kitty’s lament which sounds like a recently-unearthed Dillinger Escape Plan demo. Layering the guitar into a churning wedge of noise, MacKaye Convention dispenses with melody in favour of a rant against “Force fed nostalgia” that burns with a fierce intensity. If any piece of non-musical equipment deserves its very own track, it’s surely Stage towels, which is as sweaty and malodorous as the title implies and then, without a word of warning, the final track is unleashed with all the subtlety of an inner-city knife fight. Leaving a trail of blood and teeth, deceptive carafe sees the venue emptied, the instruments smashed and a bar bill that will break records, vocalist Steve Wheeler yelling “this is the end” over and over as strings snap and amps implode in the background. It is a suitably apocalyptic finale to an EP-length album that is so relentlessly savage, its brevity is also its saving grace.
Anyone can grab a guitar, turn the volume up to 11 and blaze away in a garage. What separates the likes of Mudhoney, Jesus Lizard and Dead Arms is the barely-concealed gift they have for somehow crafting the most atonal noise into coherent, even memorable, blasts of punk rock fury. White hot and adrenalin-charged it may be, but there’s a malevolent presence beneath the surface scree that will keep you coming back to the record, long after the initial shock of its delivery wears off. Buy it, play it – loud – you may end up with a bloody nose, but you’ll still come up smiling off the floor. 9
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