Queen Adreena - 'The Butcher & The Butterfly' (One Little Indian)
2/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Affairs like this, you feel, needn't have an audience. They're brought into existence out of personal necessity, the sound of things having been bottled up for too long and then shaken 'til they burst - certainly not 'pop' (far too tuneful a word), more howl or fume in all directions. It's therapy. But as such, it's not particularly concerned with being great music, just saying what it has to say. But every so often, great music can be made by doing just that.
'The Butcher and the Butterfly' starts off suggesting that's exactly what's about to happen. Occasionally, it's a triumph of true feeling over the tune, of what's cacophonous over what catchy. 'Suck', for example, is disgustingly crude, frighteningly filthy, invigoratingly brilliant. 'Medicine Jar', similarly, is pummelling, wide-eyed and wailing, the mist that settles in front of each one of its sounds only adding to the marvellous uneasiness of it all. Keep this up and they could be deadly. Peak soon, and at least they've driven a point across, right between our eyes.
Midway in, just that happens - 'Princess Carwash' arrives and it's the loudest believable scream, the thickest piece of significant guitar sludge that they manage for the rest of the record. To call it a peak might be a little misleading, as instead of being the true highlight of the album, it's probably just the last place where you can truly claim to be both paying full attention and enjoying doing so. Seeing how promisingly it all started, this is a true shame, but just as we were about to get as lost in it as Queen Adreena themselves seem, there's one mighty tail off. They're doing essentially the same thing, but the point is being stretched, the wounds they're scratching at starting to heal. Where half an hour of it is a convincingly invigorating smack of urgent rock and roll, whether the other half hour or it is even necessary eventually comes in to question. People can only pummel you for so long before both parties lose interest.
So you start to ask some questions. Did it really start that brilliantly? Can something ever truly be brilliant if you're so soon bored of it being done repeatedly? Would the lyrically harrowing tale of child murder in 'FM Doll' have worked wonders instead of sounding tired if the scheduling problems that keep this album wallowing in the mire instead of fighting against it were overcome? Would these questions even trouble us if it was really the great record it first suggested? No.
If you want a classy album, turn off when you feel yourself no longer paying attention. The duration you'll have listened for is about as long as 'The Butcher and the Butterfly' needs to be anyway, and for that part of it, it's a fine effort. The rest will have you wondering how people can do something so similar yet leave so little impact. But the conviction on their part at least remains, even if a listener's interest will probably start to wane. You might not need to listen to it, but admirably in any case, it sounds as if someone really needed to make the sound.
Artists in this article: Queen Adreena
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