Album review: Desalvo – Mood Poisoner

“See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya…” goes one of the refrains in the opening track of Desalvo‘s Mood Poisoner, but the cheery down-home Amercanism is delivered with the screeching savagery of a crackhead locked in one of those big charity clothing banks against a backdrop of furious grating guitars and clattering hardcore drums. Desalvo do not make friendly music, folks.

But then the packaging of Mood Poisoner told you that straight away, decorated as it is with a painting of weeping ball-gagged nuns praying in a barn full of drooling pigs. And the song titles… any band that can call a track “Latrine Lizard”, “Schindler’s Lift” or “Cock Swastika” evidently aren’t too worried about being considered a bit controversial and confrontational. Desalvo may be signed to Mogwai’s Rock Action Records, but there’s none of the label founders’ sprawling soundscaping to be found here.

Instead you get something rooted in hardcore punk and grind metal, but twisted into a brutal schizoid mess that sounds barely controlled, straining at its own minimal constraints to tear free of your speakers and leap into the room, slap you about a bit and spit on your carpet before scampering into the kitchen to do something illegal to the family dog. Desalvo mix monochord stoner bludgeon played at a million miles per hour with scraping angular guitar riffs that trade melody for sheer aggression. Mood Poisoner‘s sheer rhythmic power is admirable, but it’s not easy on the ear.

Frankly, it’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether you should wash thoroughly after listening to it, seemingly designed to sound as unappealing and defiant as possible. One might attribute this confrontational attitude to Desalvo‘s Glaswegian roots – after all, despite its recent renaissance, it’s a city that retains a dark and nasty underbelly – but in truth it’s probably something more international in outlook. Comparisons are drawn to Converge and Botch, and it’s easy to see why; Mood Poisoner is an act of catharsis, an exorcism; an expression of that brooding malice and resentment that all of us have, no matter how deep it’s buried.

The problem being that most of us don’t like to be reminded of it, and those that do can probably only take small doses at regularly spaced intervals. In other words, Desalvo are proud to make marginal music, and they deserve kudos for that in these conformist times. But Mood Poisoner is an angry album for angry people, the sort of thing you’d only want to listen to after one of those days at work when you’ve seriously contemplated whether or not you could get away with garotting your line manager with his Disney tie before setting the building alight and sellotaping razorblades to all the door handles.

There’s plenty to admire in Desalvo‘s musicianship – the illusion of unrestrained rage is a lot harder to conjure than most folk think, and their high-precision discordant bludgeon takes no prisoners whatsoever – but unless you’re a connoisseur of the nasty stuff, they’re probably best admired from a distance. The press release informs us that Desalvo “don’t want to fight you, they want you to join their fight”; I think I’ll settle for cheering them on from the safety of the sidelines.