Bandcamp The first four
They arrive as a block. “#makemoneymakelovemakemoney”, “Retrain as a Swan”, “Straight to VHS” and “Disrespect the Arts” run between four and six minutes each, sit at the same level, occupy the same frequency range and leave almost no room between their quiet and loud passages. “Straight to VHS” is the most extreme of them, compressed to a point where the arrangement has nowhere left to go.
For a London five piece playing sludge through a noise rock filter, that is a defensible choice rather than an accident. This is a tradition that treats loudness as vocabulary, and a record about injustice, division and wealth has an obvious reason to refuse dynamics. The band recorded at Bear Bites Horse in London with Wayne Adams, who knows this register well enough that the result is clearly deliberate.
It still costs something. Four tracks in a row with the same shape flatten each other out, and by the fourth the effect has stopped landing as pressure and started landing as sameness.
The two that breathe
Then the record changes its mind. “HUMAN RIGHT$” and “Accidental Holiday” are the two longest pieces here, seven and a half and nine minutes, and both carry roughly twice the distance between soft and loud that anything before them had. They are also where the band sounds least like a genre and most like itself: the riffs get room to arrive, the quiet stretches are actually quiet, and the heavy sections land because something preceded them.
That the two longest tracks are also the two most dynamic is not a coincidence, and it exposes the first half. Given space, this band writes with space. Denied it, they write a wall.
And then
“Birds of a Feather is on in 7 minutes” is two and a half minutes long, quieter than everything around it by a distance that is hard to overstate, and has virtually no top end. Almost all of it sits in the middle of the spectrum. After six tracks of saturation it feels less like an outro than like the power going off.
Naming it after a British sitcom, and after the seven minutes before it starts, is the bleakest joke on the record. All that noise about wealth and cruelty and injustice, and the last thing you hear is somebody waiting for the telly.
The cover is doing the same work. A van at night, the window fogged from the inside, someone in there lit orange, no face. It could be surveillance, an arrest, or a person with nowhere else to sleep, and the record does not tell you which. That ambiguity is the most precise thing about it.
What holds this back is the first half refusing to vary itself. What makes it worth hearing is that the second half proves the band never needed to.
The opening four tracks measure almost identically: same level, same spectral balance, and a very narrow gap between their softest and loudest moments, with “Straight to VHS” narrowest of all by some margin. Then the record opens up. “HUMAN RIGHT$” and “Accidental Holiday” carry roughly double that range, which is exactly what makes them feel slower and larger even though they are not tuned differently. The closer sits somewhere else entirely: far quieter than anything preceding it, with its energy packed into the midrange and the top end essentially absent, which is why it reads as a different recording rather than a coda.
Standout tracks: HUMAN RIGHT$, Accidental Holiday, Retrain as a Swan
