The Icarus Line - 'Penance Soiree' (V2)
3/5
By: Toby L
A phat bass-sound that Shellac's Bob Weston would froth at the mouth over, stompy drums, psychedelic, screeching wall-of-noize geetars, and Jim Morrison-cum-Perry Farrell-on-valium drawls from Joe Cardemone that are druggier than LA's The Warlocks moving in for a week with Primal Scream (now, there's an image), et voila - the second album from troublesome punk-upstarts The Icarus Line.
Their second LP, 'Penance Soiree', takes the abrasion of prior album 'Mono' and this time instead decides to include the tunes in the final mix. Not that we were complaining before: The 'Line's noisy acrobats are challenging - not only to listen to - aggravating, snotty, and incensed with the kind of furious invention that convention finds too difficult to exhibit on a common basis (our loss).
So that leaves us in a most positive situation. Trouble is, to the untrained/naive ear, this is a bloody mess. Garbled, howling, random, and - quite possibly - a touch satanic. The Icarus Line are (presumably, since your scribe is wont to the more calm aspects of living) the sound of coming down from the best drug-den party of your life, and it's - at varying intervals - surreal, terrifying, paranoid, vengeful and bleeding. But, even despite the pain, like lingering over the time you've just had, you still don't bear a trace of regret, and are quite likely to repeat such atrocities in an imminent future.
Just sample some of the titles, thus: 'Up Against The Wall, Motherf**kers'; 'On The Lash'; 'Spit On It'; 'White Devil'; erm, 'Meatmaker' to a lesser extent. This is a band that to call 'garage-rock' would impend upon your immediate execution - a 'garage' couldn't harbour this gnarly racket: aside from the neighbours messing their kecks, the very foundation of the brickwork would lead to the building's immediate demolition. Perhaps that's apt.
Loud, primal, and fantastically pompous, this may not be 'Toploader: The Best Of' territory (thank Moses), but we bet it's a darn sight more exhilarating than any other LP you could hope to pick up in the same shopping-visit within the next quarter.
Artists in this article: The Icarus Line
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