Typographic affectations usually get on my nerves because often the most interesting thing about the artist will turn out to be the name, embellished as it is with extraneous bits of programming code, meaning that the music usually sounds like the Cocteau Twins but with extra helpings of twee. On the other hand, I'm not going to argue with WILDING who has more than earned the right to render his name however he fucking well likes. Much like its predecessor, Hard Noise to Scumrise this is one of those rare albums which proves both terrifying and yet invigorating, like an hilarious funeral. It leans in far too close, gently intrudes a rough hand down the front of your pants, then looks you right in the eye as it delivers the most preposterous testimony you've ever heard; or at least that's what it does some of the time. There's less of the Hard Noise but musical abstracts continue to dominate, flowering from the arse end of growling blues numbers, even illustrating them in the case of the extended coda to Meal with bleeps and electronic squeaks which seem to depict the consumption of the postmortem corpse by whoever happens to be around - the whole heap of bacteria, who want to treat you like a cafeteria, as the lyric tells it.
Yes, the lyrics - Meal and Gezellum are particularly wonderful, although I also enjoy Music and Truck - which incorporates no less than 436 variations on the word fuck* and as such inspires fond memories of working in Catford. The lyrical wordplay is dexterous, vividly disgusting and massively entertaining all at the same time, inspiring me to lazy comparisons with persons whose work I don't actually know as well as I probably should - Beefheart, Vivian Stanshall, the rococo doggerel of Richard Stilgoe and his unbearable ilk buggered and transformed into brutalist vaudeville; or what we have is Peter Hope's Exploding Mind but funnier, except no way would you ever grow balls of volume sufficient to facilitate calling it funny to its face; and amidst all the seemingly nihilist revelations, it's curiously life affirming to find that 2022 has kicked off with an album which really doesn't sound quite like anything before.
*: I'm guessing here. I lost count at around thirty, and that was only a few lines into the song. It's a lot anyway.
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