In a fashion that would better suit the Tin-Man, Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion in Victor Fleming’s, The Wizard Of Oz, New York-based funk-rock !!! are left clutching at straws on second release proper ‘Louden Up Now’. True, the club-friendly epic punksters pulled something out of the bag with last year’s 12 inch release, ‘Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)’ but in the words of one gentle and ever so lovely Harriet Wheeler; here’s where the story ends: the awkwardly titled !!! have yielded one of the music year’s biggest anti-climaxes: oppressive mono-mood music with little or no shifts in gear. A bit like the Scissor Sisters without the hooks and the gay abandon. A bit like Gang Of Four. A lot like The Rapture.
This time around the punky riffing of 2002 debut ‘Flashlight Seasons’ gets replaced by some scruffy percussive rumblings and sparse disco arrangements. ‘Hello? Is This Thing On?’ is thrilling enough but elsewhere the sizzling jiggery pokery of the hi-hats is about all the fizz they can muster. In fact, for a record that chases the groove so shamelessly, it’s remarkable it fails to really get going outside of ‘Hello?’ and the bright and eager single, ‘Me and Giuliani Down By The School Yard’ (that said, the droll and latinesque ‘Theme From Space Island’ got repeated plays on my media player – so there’s pleasure to be found).
The style is still deeply entrenched in the 70s New York ‘no-wave’ scene (somewhere between punk rock noise and new wave avant-garde) but it really fails to score points above Sheffield’s The Magnificent Wealthy Texans for total freeform amusement.
In all honesty, a disappointment. By way of comfort I’d personally suggest lending your ears to The Two Lone Swordsmen’s recent Warp effort, ‘From The Double Gone Chapel’. It offers all this and more.