A genuine curate’s egg we have all down our front here. The Monroe Transfer is a thirteen track album clocking in at a little over sixteen minutes that could really have done with being cut in half. “What?” you ask, “But wouldn’t that make it the shortest LP since pretty much ever?” “Perhaps,” I reply, “But it’d also make it absolutely watertight”.
Take A Worm For A Walk Week hail from Glasgow, used to be Torquemada, tour with the likes of Raging Speedhorn and Skindred and have nothing, I repeat, nothing, to do with the London 7-piece ambient noodlers The Monroe Transfer. In short, they’re a noisy bunch of bastards and their songs pass by in a blur, but they’re not the types for whom brevity is a declaration of intent (see Gwar et al); it’s just that when the song ends, they end the song. Kudos to them for not feeling the pressure to pad ‘em out, say I.
Anyway, The Monroe Transfer can be sliced neatly in half straight after track 5 (which would mean losing a third not a half, I now realise - sue me), going by the name of “Ringsting”. Have I not mentioned Take A Worm For A Walk Week’s highly advanced sense of humour yet? Tracks include “Lips, Eyes and Arseholes”, “Helmet Spew”, “Turkish Snowcone” and the inner sleeve is a drawing of a mutual enema. We’re not talking the slow-burning layers of humour of Tom Lehrer here.
These first five songs whoosh by in a riot of small boys steaming through the pick n mix counter at Woolworths leaving nothing standing - bar the knowledge that, really, we could all do that, we just don’t want to. Visceral thrills but little in the way of nutrition.
From “Lips, Eyes and Arseholes” onwards, however, Take A Worm For A Walk Week are like the older brothers of the previous lot. Still loud and obnoxious, still over faster than sex with a lifer, but now with added experience, cleverness, the ability to surprise. If “Lips… “ is a stunning piece of twisted funk, then the cover of Devo’s “Whip It” that follows it is its exact opposite, coldly stripping away the original’s own brand of so-white-it’s-translucent (that word again) funk leaving it entirely sexless and ugly… and I really rather like it.
Then it’s a race through the final six tracks of The Monroe Transfer, each tricksier than the last; more frantic but exponentially more techy than the frat-noise that opens the album. As is the norm with this genre, it can at times sound like it was recorded in a different room to the band itself (with the bass seemingly actually out in the street). But it never feels as if that’s because it “had to do”, but rather seems to be the sound best considered to drill into your head directly through the eyeballs.
Take A Worm For A Walk Week are currently on tour with Raging Speedhorn and The Mirimar Disaster (Oct/Nov ‘08) and, on the basis of The Monroe Transfer, I think I’m certainly going to have to travel to see them. I’d suggest you do too.
Who wouldn’t like it? Oh, lots of people; it’s not easy listening per se, but it’s a whole skip-full of fun and really leaves you wanting to play it through over and over. Who would? Anyone who likes their music fast, loud and appreciates the “wrong” dance sound of, say, Pere Ubu (not that they sound alike; I’ll blithely assume you get what I mean, you look like bright people and I’ve run out of spa-
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: hardcore, mathcore, spazzcore, Take A Worm For A Walk Week, The Monroe Transfer
