“There’s so much in the sonics and bones of ‘Believe’ that it’s hard to know just where start. It’s frustratingly clever, emphatically catchy, and just so damn easily accessible…”
Nottingham
A gutterslung duo of smoke-smothered sand-blasted southern-stomp rock. A raw dirtbomb squalor of holler and grind. Gnawed gurning riffs, hymn crushing hooks, and a mean blast of bloody punch drums.
“In this tight run of three minute snapshots of anger, each skewed by their knee jerk reflections, the very worst track you’ll here find is least favorite. This particular compact and pleasurable mess is the best that Slumb Party have sounded.”
They live in a haze of accidentally anthemic self-made and self-assured angst, where webs and threads of Bona Drag and Juju clean-jangled guitars (from Morrissey and Banshees respectively) weave like a network of nerves up and through.
“Each song sounds like a deep fear of drowning …and Every now and then, and just for a second, some sugar-dirt glimmer of sound slices through but we’re swimming in loneliness still.”
“Through mutations and lineups and 40+ years, The Stranglers are always The Stranglers; Always present, still moving, for better …Or worse.”
“40 years worth of love and half blind adoration has gathered us here to sing to hymns from ‘The Crack’; The Ruts ’79 debut album. Thick with punk’s grit and gristle and dub-reggae tricks it’s a head above pure protest thrash.”
Slung back and forth through an excess-free set… Everything’s played like it’s fresh out the meat locker, everything’s keen and still glowing.
Analogue maps of waking states, organic contortions and textures…. Breakbeat and jungle get stripped to essentials, then stripped down again to an essence.
Harsh isolation, dystopian dreamscapes, semi-connected catharsis caught up in electronic precision.
That’s the evolving sound of Blancmange 2.0; collections of stripped down half hooks, building in escalating elaborations, repeated in sheets of thin ice and cool water. This is Neil Arthur from 2016’s Unfurnished Rooms, through to 2017’s Fader and Near Future, through this year’s Blancmange album Wonderlust.
