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| As I write this review, I’m surrounded by a scene of relative devastation. I’m lying on my bed, wide-eyed and shell-shocked, and my stereo has been pulled up right next to my battered ears. It is emitting a strange, stressed crackling sound from the left speaker - a complaint from the overexertion I have submitted it to in the previous four minutes. And this is just after the second track of Engerica’s debut album has thundered past me like monster truck. |
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This is real energy. This is raw, uncompromising aggression. This is a pure white light filtered through a complex set of lenses and mirrors and converted into an intense sonic assault. This is punk rock. And it feels good.
Because, from the moment that David Gardner starts shrieking like a subhuman Frank Black on opener ‘Reasons To Be Fearful (Part I)’, the music becomes all-consuming. This is why we spend hundreds - scratch that, thousands - of pounds on music every year. This is why we picked up guitars as teenagers. This is why we go to the shows. This is why we care.
Self-deprecating, playful and so black in tone it absorbs all colour, There Are No Happy Endings sees a band performing with a sound so unique and honed that it’s virtually impossible to believe this is their first full-length offering.
‘The Smell’ swings in musical mood from catchy singalong chorus to howling anxiety attack, unpredictable like the most feared patient in a high security psychiatric ward; ‘Funeral Song' burns a slow fuse towards a volatile powderkeg of wailing guitars and overwrought vocals; and ‘Crooked Sex’ sounds like an excerpt from a mescaline and whiskey-fuelled session featuring Andy Cairns and the Dead Kennedys. But these examples are not highlights - it’s impossible to isolate highlights from an album which constantly impresses and whose quality never drops below the highest plateau.
This reminds me why I used to go to shows and dance at the front with complete disregard for anyone around me. This is the irrationality that lurks in the most logical of thought processes. This is music at its most base level - pure, guttural and organic.
There Are No Happy Endings is a sub-50 minute example of the form a great rock album should take. Driving, catchy, relentless - the adjectives keep coming - but most notably there’s an obvious dedication from this three-piece. A dedication to producing uncompromising, novel rock music. During ‘Trick Or Treat’, the band’s spokesman Gardner tells me they’d ‘die for rock n roll’. On this evidence, I’d have no reason not to believe them. |
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| James Haddrill - 9/10 |
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Name:
James Delve
| Date:
30/03/06 | Reply
Fantastic review. Your best yet man, and very very true.
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