Album review: Part Chimp – Thriller

People have been enthusing at me about Part Chimp for ages. I seem to remember it starting with Mary-Anne Hobbes on Radio 1 singing their praises in 2003, but since then a number of folk have raved at me, claiming them as one of the best UK bands of their type. So here I sit after a couple of listens to their latest long-player, Thriller, and I’m wondering if somehow I’ve been listening wrong.

Seemingly the bored denizens of a backwater passport control booth on the oft-disputed (though rarely fought over) border between stoner-sludge and noise rock, Part Chimp sound to me like a band who desperately want to be the British Melvins, but who can’t quite capture that uniquely schizoid vibe that the Seattle veterans have made their trademark.

To be clear – Thriller is not a bad record, but nor does it have the sort of planet-smashing awesomeness that the Part Chimp evangelists had implied. It has planet-smashing volume, though, which is usually a great place to start. Album opener “Trad” owes its central riff to Kyuss, but the vocal delivery and atonal lead lines are no-wave noisenik tricks that sit well with the beefy cranked-amp tones. As the album progresses, these two principle components take turns in the spotlight, but never stepping far back from stage front or venturing beyond the established highways and byways of the genre.

It’s not for want of trying; I really want to like Thriller more than I do, but it just can’t seem to escape the gravity well of competence and pull off the sort of impressive orbital manoeuvring that makes an album really stand out. For example, “Tomorrow Midnight” starts with a creeping and doomish riff at a funereal pace, and quickly becomes decorated with fuzzy guitar doodlings; then everything goes more than a little bit Melvins with quietly creepy sotto voce vocals over a momentary period of calm before a storm of crashing cymbals and lethargically pounded riffs brings us back to business as usual. But throughout, the hairs on the back of my neck remain resolutely unruffled.

I like Part Chimp‘s sound, their tone – it’s a huge thing in itself, the texture of red-lined amps and fuzz-boxes cranked up way beyond eleven, speaker cones straining to escape their magnetic confines and blast their way into the room. I also like the atmosphere – moody, almost sullen, but seemingly with the tip of its tongue creeping cheek-wards – and the overall aesthetic of Thriller. But be that as it may, I’m distinctly underwhelmed. I mean, Thriller is good, yeah; I’d be quite pleased to listen to it on a road-trip to a gig with friends or something. But would I pluck it out of my collection to play to a friend as a must-hear slice of genius? I don’t think I would.

Perhaps we’re a trifle spoilt; after all, there’s plenty of good sludgy noise rock to choose from of late, each band delivering their own unique slant or distinctive flavour. Or perhaps Thriller doesn’t have the special Part Chimp magic that so enthralled my friends on their earlier releases… I’d have to go back and try them out to be sure, and that’s not an entirely unappealing prospect. But that said, there’s a lot of other great music competing for my attention, and Part Chimp just haven’t grabbed me by the collar with this latest offering; I suspect I’ll love ‘em playing live (and I’ll make a point of going to see them now I know how they sound), but I also suspect Thriller will lounge at the lower end of my most-played statistics. File under “pretty decent”.