Rudimentary Peni – Death Church

Southern

Rudimentary Peni always seemed like a ticking clock of dystopias to me, a psychotic scaffold of tri-chords and drums, pyre-building a grinding axe of vocals, ranting at the greed miestering stink that (still) ruins, contaminates.

Death Church, their first proper long player, spews out a gothika of crucifixes to nail society’s ills to – world hunger, hypocritical religion, the two-faced cancer of celebrity, vivisection and more. The guitars wheeling around the thematics like that bad taste roadster on the Birthday Party‘s junkyard. Nick Blinko’s voice has a leer of Andi SexGang about it, as if milking those obsessive scabic lines of his pen-and-ink drawings, cross-hatching the black, chewing at your ears like a frothy-faced hyena, cobra-cramming the air with repeat choruses you could venomously sing along to.

It’s a gem (or should that be germ) of tightly-wound austerity, spittle rooted in hard skins, rolling wakes, zizzing cymbals. I can see skater-kids today happily smashing themselves into the concrete to this. It rips into your head brilliantly with thorny crowns of dissatisfaction, yells with a insane conviction that was a cut above the generic (tourist- friendly) mohawk protest, grabbing back the individuality with a sneer. Lobbing gripe-filled bombs of black blood and the odd severed head, sliding the wheelchair words about in slurs of e’s and r’s… sardonically spiking, falling out of the “Vampire state building” that’s crumbling: “It’s crumbling, it’s – crumbling, crumbling, crumblingggggg,” screams Blinko, and you believe it.

What a bile-fuelled 32 minutes, the growling primates and multiple personalities, the destructive smash, crash, smash, relish of “Alice crucify the paedophiles.” It’s a brawling apoc-o-leptic beast, burning catherine wheel-like in the inky blackness of a Van Gogh night. There’s no pretence here, it’s the real deal , the charred grin on the back cover throwing out plenty of jagged lines at the complacent.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-