Test Dept – Disturbance

One Little Indian

The beats might be more machine tooled than salvaged these days, but Test Dept still haven’t lost any of that rage or taste for addressing injustice. This return to form is snarling at the usual subjects, the dirty end of capitalism and its bankrupt ideologies.

Back in the day it was Thatcher’s ugly dismemberment of the coal industry that promoted their battle cry and now, too many years later, it seems a shame that we are deja-vu(ing) into another political mess as the shadow of those eighties policies is still cancerously eating though our better intentions and our great institutions. Honestly, 2019 couldn’t be a better time for this band’s return — and what a strong document they’ve created.

The kick of “Speak Truth To Power”  — a steel-toecap to the power-mongers — the trumpets and overdriven orchestrals heralding a call to arms. The technoid pound of “Landlord”, a fist in the face of the self-serving / the outsourced state, the megaphoned lyrics overlaid effectively over an angry crowd’s chanting as the insistent percussives machine-gun the message through. The photo of the charred remains of the Grenfell high-rise giving you an eerily soundless counterpoint. “Debris” slow-cooking the sentiment in a Solzhenitsyn rub of gentle gamelan sounds, broken piano lines and a creepy whispered ennui amongst metallic clangs on a disused factory floor. A marked change in temperature that reminds one of Beating The Retreat’s “Cold Witness”.

The air-raid whir and short-wave smears of “Full Spectrum Dominance” is another highpoint. A war protest to a stuttering bassline, jivering to the sound of smashed glass and flat anvil sounds. A deluxe headphone experience as the military snare bleeds into the inky exhausts of launched missiles and the empty clank of cartridge cases spraying the concrete floor. A breathtaking update on the sample couture found on their Unacceptable Face Of Freedom LP.

It’s always a little scary when a band you love makes a return, especially after such a long hiatus, but when all that silly stuff evaporates to results this good, and the effort they’ve put into this baby just beams, it just makes things more potent. Plenty of grit in the machine and broken crunch on the dance floor, but they’re at their best twisting the knife in slowly. The oozy malevolence of “Gatekeeper” is a superb example — the carnivorous choiring, those whirring slurs all punctured in clashy metallics. An atmosphere that folds in on you with a devouring claustrophobia before the hardcore animal that is “GBH84” smacks you in the face with its neon rawness. A song speaking of the industrial heartland that’s now an urban Poundland to a Front 242 football chant and funeral march under-creep.

Not a bad track on here, and the delicate hand-slapped melodics of “Two Flames” close the journey in a Rother-like airiness, a gentle distraction to what you’ve tasted so far. A track that then lifts off super-saturated, a serrated pleasure that depth-charges with looped cheering and clapping. Lots of stereo wow slipping your hemispheres, cutting back to taped news footage and gong reverbs before its electro resurrections are putting a diamond’s shine back in your eye. The twin flames in question, hope and anger, balancing between the rich who will never feel rich enough and the poor who are desperately aware of how little they have.

“Poverty is a crime”, go Test Dept… (surely) “it’s payback time?”

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-