Adrian Cooper has been unwell

Old reviews that are no longer available online, or from sites that no longer exist. The pen is dead, long live the camera.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

McLusky
'My Pain & Sadness Is More Sad & Painful Than Yours'


What’s that on the horizon? It’s making one fuck of a racket. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, you twat, it’s McLusky and they’re here to obliterate the history of Welsh music and make the world a slightly safer place to visit again.

At a recent gig for Radio 1’s Cardiff Sound City fandango, the usual bunch of ‘oh, aren’t I trendy’ Welsh fashion-whores crammed into a tiny club to celebrate how cool they must all be, and then tried to dance to McLusky’s bastardised noise onslaught, only to look on in bemusement and fear when singer Andy Falkous began to pound his body against the stage and Jon Chapple started thrashing himself with his bass. Hear them scream; see them run like little bunny rabbits, ‘Nurse, the evil men have escaped again’.

‘My Pain & Sadness…’, which amply illustrates just how they managed to alienate so many clueless people in such a short space of time, is little short of a call to arms, which offers a sneer to their supposed contemporaries just before smashing them over the head with their ferocious and snarling yet beautiful music. Given that McLusky sound like Nirvana torturing Big Black, you just know that there’s gonna be no messing with these boys. Former singles ‘Joy’ and ‘Rice Is Nice’ flash past before you’ve had time to realise just how good they are, yet still leave you feeling like you’ve just been buggered by Black Francis. ‘Friends Stoning Friends’ nicks the riff of Sleeper’s ‘Inbetweener’ and the chorus of Terrovision’s ‘Oblivion’, sums up Welsh life in one line ("you’re moving to the city cos your village is shit") and still sounds great. And if the friends that they’re stoning are art-pop no-hopers Mo-ho-bish-opi, then we’re gonna be laughing even harder.

In spite of this though, ‘whiteliberalonwhiteliberalaction’ is their true pièce de résistance, as they kidnap the traditional off-key discordance of Pavement and get it pissed on cheap vodka and Molotov cocktails. Even the title is a barely concealed dig at the Manics; at how many levels do you want one song to be so utterly brilliant?

If ‘My Pain & Sadness…’ is any indication of what to expect from McLusky, then the cock-rock blustering and laddism of the majority of Welsh indie-rock is about to be blown away and buried in a disused mine shaft. In short, the future’s bright, the future’s real fucking nasty sounding, and Terris definitely aren’t invited. You’d better get used to it, or get out the way, cos otherwise McLusky are gonna pursue you until you die along with the bloated corpse which has constituted the Welsh music scene for far too long.