Repo Man – Minesweeping

Lava Thief

From the angsty bristles of their debut All Mind in the Cat House comes another Jaggersaw of squabbling quadients with a smidgen more hip-swinging melody sneaking under/over that the despotic word spillage. A danceable zest that happily avoids cliché whilst simultaneously dragging you through a thicket of barbed carnivores and bullying percussions.

This is so good — every song a radiant splinter, siphoning the spirit of The Birthday Party billowing on Fall-like sails and more some. A bit of James Johnston in the toppling guitar department, with maybe a taste of Spleen’s inherent psychosis about it — but to be honest, this is breath of fresh air that doesn’t need the crutch of comparison to it prop up. A rare commodity indeed, stitching in the new, splashing the melodic with glittering clashes of no wave, duelling gravities that seem to leap that ever-present word count.

Those scatter-golic yells that devil the detail, take your mind through skipping ropes as your eyes suck up the lyric sheet. Oh man, the lyric sheet, or should that be poetic manifesto — a whole 12 inches of paper saturated in tiny white words (which were, I’m reliably told, very painful to proofread). Contrasty lines that when accidentally bent, echo the ziggurat bite of your ear in trippy waves of visual nausea.

Seeing this lot live is like an aural fight scene of gyrating dynamics. On record they are just as infectious — a trickling banquet that roars off, milking the unpredictable swagger drooling from  lead vocalist Bojak’s mouth, the burning kerosene of discontent. “Let’s see the sun set with fatiqueeeeee!!! Asinine Asinine”, Bojak yelling a literary hothouse as the music vividly follows it and he squeezes the words into ever tighter spaces like an energetic Bukowski swaying on a dismantled horizon.

Every song is a battle ground, “Wretch” ripping raw from the onslaught then jangling with jack rabbits. A cosy bounce that’s regularly cut up in Brillo pads of white-hot insistence that throw massive “yeahhhs” through your head. A musical maelstrom that matches Bolak’s whirring mind intoxicated on insight, mischievously poking the oblique, as epic (Neubauten–like) shafts of guitar rise around him and the drums’n’bass crescendo the irregularity.

“Static Excess Strobe Effect” is another. Starting in an inept lush of violin to words jumping from a speeding freight train caked in go-faster guitars and feisty jars. “The barren winter trees remind me of my formative years”, reminiscences the vocalist. “Tongue insidious as a listless intone”, he adds, his tailcoat flapping in a breeze of chopping frets. Honestly, this is so high on the mind-stabbing riches — you’d be a fool to let it slip your clutches.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-