mythology | audio | news/performance | discog | press | buy | links | contact
REVIEWS:
NME It wears shades at noon. It doesn't care about you, baby - it just curls its lip at your love and takes a drag of its life-giving cigarette. It's got Johnny Thunders riffs for a heart, Suicide's appetite for destruction for a soul, and its head is filled with the fevered drone of the city that never comes down off its speed jag. It's a clichéd beast, New York scuzz rock - but one too attractive to care. Grand Mal are grown men who have spent the last decade ruining their prospects in various dissolute rock outfits. Like a cargo cult that time has passed by, they remain strung out on this superannuated musical formula: witness 'Fun Fun Fun' (so Stooges it hurts) and 'Superstars' (slick with brutalist glam). But elsewhere, they've dosed the nervy '70s prototype with a massive injection of grooviness. 'Stay In Bed''s slacker soul could almost be Primal Scream, while Grasshopper from Mercury Rev tinkles keyboards with warm flesh at every turn. In fact, the Rev's space-rock bliss seems to have infected the Mal's none-more-black hearts, making 'Picture You (As Always Falling)' into a love song of sorts, and 'Sucker's Bet' a knowing quip at their gutter roots. Grand Mal, then. Sick and wrong, but at the same time, just right. 7/10
|
|||
