Undergroove 050

Jesus wept. What a mess. No, not this albummy thoughts, after hearing this thing a few times, before the white-jackets come racing after meor is it THEM? Ahlets seePILGRIM FATHERS from Nottingham, UK. Remember one of your bands back in high school where you wanted to do two-minute punk rock versions of Deep Purple being raped by Motorhead? Yeah… me neither. Just sayin.

These sick bastards have some nerve. Their press releaseif you can call it thatsays that the kids play music for astronauts to die to, which would be fine if the sentence didnt end in a preposition. Or, perhaps, more to the point, if it said astronauts were traveling through space playing two-minute gang rape songs of Deep Purple being molested by Motorhead

Anyway_Short Circular Walks in the Hope Valley_ comes on all soft, furry, and ambient, and then kicks one right in the teefers. The levels are all at 11, howling vocals pinched into bullet microphones, guitars phased quaky, riff-y, and loud. What makes the music so darned fascinating is that I, indeed, can see some hapless and wayward astronaut floating nearby during this strangely intoxicating noise. After nine tracks of give and pull between logic, songcraft, noise, space rock, noise, cacophony, Satan/weirdo lyrics, hammy Hawkwind hack-offs (hey, they even had the chutzpah to compare themselves to Lemmys former band, the 1970s thrash acid prog rockers), noise, and arty mixes betwixt left and right headphones, well after nine tracks of all of THAT, they unleash The Edwardian Astronaut, which is some form of accomplishment clocking in at eight-plus minutes, and clearing out 500 square miles of noise-sensitive cats, and normal humans (unlike your trusty reviewer/writer/skull fuck aficionado) with passages of truly gorgeous astronaut-homicide rawk.

But that’s, like, one track after nine nail biters that dont add up to much more than a fine future in sonic wallpaper removal. Lets hope on their second effortif they can make it past the debut album was really swell, mates! phasePilgrim Fathers can raise themselves up by their UK Mars Mission boot latches, and create something other than the sound that gives dissonance a bad name. In other words, more of that original noodle-tweak spin found within The Edwardian Astronaut, and the launch pad countdown/slow death beaut called Old Man Time in the Rivers of Rhyme, (with small samples of the art-rock-warped Cosmic Space Lazers and the twisted futuristic metal on Ultimate Attack Helicopters) and less of Johnny Rotten fronting Deep Motorfloyd, please.