Sounds From The Junkshop #75 - McLusky

 

"Cartoon monkeys got ya hard, it must've been the hair/And though Jive Bunny stole your creative fire, you really didn't care" - McLusky - Dethink To Survive

McLusky...jeez, where do you start? For five glorious minutes, they were pretty much the best band in Britain only for things to spontaneously combust and them to vanish just as soon as they'd arrived. Having formed in South Wales in the mid-'90s, the group spent half a decade slogging away on the toilet circuit before To Hell With Good Intentions, the lead-off single from their second album, unexpectedly landed them centre stage after picking up plaudits in pretty much every corner of the music press.

If you've not heard McLusky before then I really dunno how to describe their sound to you. Their plaudits heralded them as the sound of Chris Morris/Charlie Brooker style gonzo writing applied to post-hardcore while one especially harsh review likened them to Timmy from South Park fronting the Pixies. One thing's for sure though, they certainly weren't dull with the title track from the EP containing lyrics like "My love is bigger than your love/We take more drugs than a touring funk band!" with the two and a bit minutes basically appearing to sound like childhood playground taunts aimed at other bands. A send-up? Genuine anger and bitterness? Who knows but was certainly a hell of a trip.

To Hell With Good Intentions had clearly bamboozled the world at a stroke so McLusky decided what the hell and casually chucked out their second and best album McLusky Do Dallas to finish the job. Even listening to this now, it still has the sort of ferocity that makes it stick out like a sore thumb from 90% plus of the competition around this time. From the brutal two minute opener Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues, McLusky Do Dallas is the musical equivalent of being thrown headfirst through a third floor window and landing somewhere soft enough to just about cushion your fall. You're not quite sure what happened but you're impressed that you somehow survived it.

Mixing ferocious hardcore guitars, screaming vocals and some brilliantly bizarre childish insults, tunes like Collagen Rock ("The little kid pissed on the big kid's porch/He thinks he's brilliant, he's rubbish of course"), Fuck This Band ("Fuck this band/'Cos their clothes don't fit/But their dancing clowns are incredible"), Gareth Brown Says ("All your friends are cunts/Your mother is a ballpoint pen thief"), Day Of The Deadringers ("This one's for the patriots, the new wave good time girls/And if it wasn't for the Decepticons, they'd rule the fucking world") right down to the way the album highlight Dethink To Survive ends with singer Andy Falkous frenziedly screaming "DANNY BAKER!" repeatedly into the mic, there's never been an album quite like this. And in all probability, there never will be.

...and there's the rub. The trouble was that having come up with such an absolute full on stormer of an album that the only way for McLusky to go from here was down and when the follow-up, 2005's The Difference Between You And Me Is I'm Not On Fire, came out it just couldn't bear up. It was still a decent enough effort and had they put this out before ...Do Dallas, it would probably have set that album up nicely but as it is it just kind of felt like a step down from the full on brilliant insanity of its predecessor. Oh sure, it still had the odd great moment like Forget About Him, I'm Mint but by and large it felt a bit more reined in and not quite as special.

Although The Difference Between You And Me... sold respectably, McLusky weren't long for this world afterwards as relations between Falkous and bassist Jon Chapple were rapidly heading south and the group would split in 2006 releasing a farewell singles and rarities compilation called McLuskyism. Falkous would go on to form the not entirely dissimilar Future Of The Left which eventually mutated back into McLusky a few years ago (albeit with Chapple absent). The band still command a healthy following (similar to These Animal Men, arguably even more so than they did in their heyday) and I was hoping to go and see them on tour this year, having caught them live a few times back in the early noughties and always enjoyed their gigs (they were exactly the sort of cheerfully sarky bastards onstage that you'd expect from listening to their songs)  until I realised a ticket for their Leeds gig was £25. I mean I like 'em but not that much y'know?

Regardless of that though, McLusky Do Dallas is still one of my favourite albums of the early noughties - there's a lot of records that claim to be the sound of sheer insanity but this one's right up there with Life, Sex & Death's The Silent Majority. Brutally heavy and side-splittingly hilarious all at once, it really is a unique and brilliant album and McLusky will have my eternal respect for it.