You can’t criticise a chap for naming himself Faris Rotter (or Joshua Von Grimm or Spider Webb) when just about everybody else making music is called something like Tom Chaplin (or Chris Martin or Gary ‘Bloody’ Lightbody). You just can’t. And you can’t just have a pop at rock band for having abstract-goth vaudeville creations atop their heads when the most glamorous haircuts in British rock for the past decade could almost universally achieved with the aid of a medium sized pudding bowl (Andy Huxley, ex of 80s Matchbox, aside of course). And finally you can’t simply slate a band for hijacking the concept of performance, spinning it silly on the waltzers and then ramming it through the hall of mirrors and making the only music that rightly fits that kerfuffle when just about everything else seems like a coma in b-minor by comparison.
There is exhilaration in spades here (just don’t ask what the spade’s for, and watch your back), there is – if not anarchy – exaggeration and inebriated theatricality. The only thing that could have ruined this whole act would be if the content and direction couldn’t live up to the filthy extravagance of the set design. But it’s clear by the time track 3, ‘Draw Japan’, has you under siege with a welter of psycho surf-guitar, nauseating looped delay, cult chanting and omnipresent organ at break-neck pace – having already sat through a fearsome cover of Screaming Lord Such’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ and pitch-black psychedelia of single ‘Count In Fives’ – that there is no danger of that. Though that isn’t of course to say there is no danger.
There’s barely a verse where you’re not caught off-guard by a projectile blister of feedback exploding unannounced into your left lug-hole, or a overloading guitar-solo squall convulsing suddenly to the rear, a tumbling psychedelic riff running tangles around your feet or monstrous organ looming over the horizon and blocking out the sun. And it’s always on the march, a histrionically terrifying, unrepentant march. It might tread a boggy path already well defined by The Cramps, Pussy Galore, even the Stooges through 3D 60s b-movie glasses, but they do it with such imaginative drama, they boldly dig a niche for themselves and fill it up like a shallow grave with bulbous, jagged shapes still twitching through the soil. Who cares if there’s little in the way of actual songs!? Just enjoy the immediacy of the pandemonium every last step of the way.
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