[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]O[/dropcap]utside, it’s like March never happened, with winter-cold temperatures; inside it’s barely less frigid.
The cat’s fucked off into the aether for the evening, 
but will soon be scratching on the door of the conservatory (I’ve gone up in the world, don’t you know?), so she can then, for reasons best known to herself, void her insides in the litter tray rather than on next door’s lawn. Al Jazeera has a news report on Alaskan huskies. I feel colder still.
Why am I telling you this? Because our lives are dull, repetitive, predictable. We’re not even the centre of our own universes, let alone anyone else’s.
Then this self-titled EP starts blasting out art/noise/mathcore/etc rock from the laptop, and makes the world rich and uncertain once more.
[quote]the warbling, automated gynoid starts trilling[/quote]
It’s stripped down, pure, discordant music and madness and genius shaking itself apart in a maelstrom. Not like the cack they play on the radio, as the warbling, automated gynoid starts trilling about how she’s fallen in lurr-rrr-ve with a monster, and all the teenage girls nod their heads and say that maybe you can still change him, and if he hits you, it’s probably your fault anyway.
But this is something more real, more pure. The guitars strum, throb and boom and shriek, and the drums pound with methodical rhythm, and the shambolic, mutant tune that isn’t a tune still drags you along like it is one, because it’s still catchy as hell, and that’s before the judder-beast riffs suddenly leap out of nowhere and scream with life and fury and primordial power, like Picasso hurling paint at a canvas.
Yes, this is rather marvellous.
And yes, the vocals sound like they’re being delivered by a rambling madman, but even that’s inspired in a perverse sort of way; like the lead singer has fallen headfirst into chaos, while the rest of the music stops just short of the dotted line, but still occasionally leans across, if only for a moment, just so it can let that primal energy infuse it, and cast aside the ugly burden of structure, convention and verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-boring-fucking-chorus. And so the EP balances perfectly between the extremes of order and screechscreechscreech, and it’s oh so very dazzlingly wonderful.
Did I mention they’re from Leeds?
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Alexander Hay is a writer and polemicist based online and in print.
