I’m not sure if it splits cleanly down the middle, but I tend to think there’s two types of heavy music — music that sounds like the smell of melted plastic, warped doorframes and scattered glass of a burnt-out building, and stuff that’s clean.
Happily, this falls into the former category. A bass sound that’s less bass teacher with a neat ponytail and more holding to the nut with the last nerve of a molar. Riffs like watching a car chase on fire, opiated. Lyrics I can’t make out, but the vocals are in that range of screaming that makes you wonder how he made it past the first gig without sounding like a forty-a-day cigar smoker. Well, there’s the odd reprise of a kind of gallows melodicism. You know how hardcore is these days.
I saw Pascagoula a few weeks ago in a tiny, rammed venue in Brigton. It was filthy. Sweat and beer and broken glass everywhere, no clear idea when the audience stopped being audiencely, limbs curiously ignoring gravity. Was an absolute blinder.
BORING DAD BIT — I have to say it’s a lush record as well. The lyric sheet is nicely typeset (serif, constructivist red and black, double-spacing). It looks nice. Astonishingly for a band that aren’t well-known, they’ve put more effort into their press release than usual; it manages to be simultaneously witty, ridiculous and (whisper it) well-written. “…one mans’ startling claim that experiments had been conducted on his eardrums, [redacted] and scrotal sac, shortly after being abducted from a remote mushroom patch by an[redacted] shaped object. / The truth will unfortunately never be known. T-shirts are available.”
Something that’s just sinking in as I’m listening now is that it’s got that trick, a trick that a record should have, of never quite stylistically sounding like the same band when I’m focussing on it, but also not sounding like a bunch of wankers pissing about with every genre. Or, like, they obviously know their heavy stuff better than muggins here. Actually, maybe it’s occupying a space that’s closer to the sort of ’80s alt idea of heavy — Jesus Lizard-ly and songs less about power and fucking than fucking power and paranoia. Swans-ly, for instance, “I’m a wrecked machine, a fantasy, the one abused to be the king of screws”.Dunno really. Here, I’ll tell you this for free — tick any of the following and you’re probably want to be digging into your pockets hard earnedly for this: hardcore, scrams, shouting, riffular, banger, heavier than solar wind.
-Kev Nickells-
