Shake Chain – Snake Chain

Upset The Rhythm

Shake Chain are a confusing and disturbing car crash of semi-danceable proportions. Their Snake Chain album opens with the sound of a post-punk band idly observing some horrifying local disturbance and it kind of grown battier from there.

The apparent audio verité of war-torn strife seriously shakes the listener up and it is singer Kate Mahony‘s feral howl that sets the already tight as hell band apart from the rest. Pointed, gothy, portentous, doomy, the guitar is cavernous while the synth wibbles like old sci-fi and Kate does her best to upset the listener.

It isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but if you make it through it is like re-discovering music. Stubborn, oppressive beats, a real barrage from drummer Joe Fergey accompany a voice that is like the woman from Audiobooks has had a nervous breakdown and is venting that despair in the most cathartic of acts. There is an edge of hysteria in the musical backing that prompts the voice to blast around like a busted spray can. They do nothing to calm the proceedings and if anything only exacerbate it.

The musical trio doesn’t let up. You can’t slip a fag paper between the squalid noise walls they build and the words seem to bash against them like bloodied heads again and again. Funnily, I was reminded of Stump in places and in certain tracks, it was like the anarchic spirit of Mick Lynch had taken up residence in Kate’s body; a stream of consciousness with an edge of mania. It is the focal point, but the group are always visible, piling on the pressure, changing textures, always aware of an imminent assault.

It is a shame Ron Johnson Records isn’t still around as they would have been a shoe-in; but then looking back, perhaps that is the function that Upset The Rhythm plays today; taking a risk on the stuff that is resolutely awkward but hangs onto the image of a fourpiece going all out for a crowd.

I imagine this crew would be a difficult but rewarding experience live, the histrionic electric guitar sometimes out wailing the vocal, but it can be the vocals that affect the band. I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Birthday Party track “Yard” at one point, the voice having a great vibrato when slowed down; but always the sense of expectation is there, action painting with words as the band prowl and surge around her.

The band are super supple and able to roll with most punches, but when the crying starts, even they waver a little and struggle to maintain equilibrium, dodging and crashing around, trying not to be too affected. The thing about the voice is that once you think that it is about freedom, a complete sense of abandon and just making the right emotional noises for this situation, it all falls into place like afar more entertaining version of primal scream therapy.

In fact, once the machine-gun punk guitar, cheesy Fall-esque keyboards and abrasive Cramps-like bedlam beat drop away for the final track, the realisation that under the caterwauling and abrasive confusion there is a warm, intimate voice is all the more extraordinary.

Perhaps in this current global situation, the only way to push across messages of corporate greed, unrealistic aspirations and middle-class fallacies is to throw them out the window like this to land on the heads of the passing public. In this case, it is so worth looking up to be splattered by Snake Chain I can’t tell you.

-Mr Olivetti-