THE ICARUS LINE

ARGH! This is one brutally uncompromising album. More so, even, than Relationship of Command. The vocals barely break out of a scream, the drums sound like they're being beaten by more drums (copyright Kerrang!) and the two guitars snarl and snake their way in and out of the carnage. This is certainly not an album for the feint-hearted. It's bleedin' good, though. Again they've been compared to the Jesus Lizard which are another band I'm not familiar with so screw you. To me they sound just like Phil Collins-era Genesis. Alright I'm joking. The Stooges make a better "classic" reference point although this is even more intense. The "oo" noise made at the end of "Love Is Happiness" is straight out of "Down on the Street". When I first heard it I could just about warm to it but the unrelenting wild aggression of the vocals were giving me cause for concern. But then I thought about it and no doubt if I held a same attitude in 1970 I'd be the typical Zeppelin/Floyd fan who'd hear Fun House by the Stooges and go: "the music's quite good but that Iggy Pop is off his head, ruining the whole thing." Of course, in reality, I rate Iggy's performance on Fun House as quite possibly the best by a frontman ever recorded to tape. So these days I really enjoy Joe Cardamone's unrelentless screaming for what it is, and now realise the album would be far inferior without it. But as a warning, of all the CDs I've reviewed on here, with this one be prepared for a rough ride. This ain't no fucking Travis. Apparently it is post-hardcore which I always assumed was the very heaviest of heavy metal but I think it is heavy punk rock as opposed to the bland pop-punk of Blink 182 and Green Day. Now I know I'm not traditional punk's biggest fan but given that classic rock is effectively off the menu these days (by definition) this sort of stuff is still up my street. After all, I'm big on the Stooges and MC5. So down to business. Firstly these fucking jokers haven't printed the song titles on the back of the case (inside the inlay booklet) so I'm afraid I couldn't place every track to its correct name, although I can for most. In fact I couldn't name all the tracks. Not that I haven't listened to this album a lot, I have. But it all moves on so seamlessly and with such gusto it doesn't seem fair to regard each track as an individual. On the other hand, if you did so, the majority would still come out as great tracks. For example, although I am well familiar with the song "Oh Faithless" I know it as "the song that follows 'Feed a Cat to Your Cobra'". Still this is punk rock and such pedantic nonsense is not wanted round these parts. The album opener, "Love is Happiness" is a fucking belter. Starting with, and thus the whole album, a piercing scream the song careers onwards with brutal intensity, sometimes breaking down, sometimes changing structure but still scorching its way to oblivion. The second song "You Make Me Nervous" is a slower affair with a threatening bass-line and regularly erupting into grunge-esque crunching guitars and screaming vocals. The other two tracks that make up the first four are also belters in the take-no-prisoners format, "L.O.S.T." and "Enemies in High Places". The album is then broken up by an eight minute arty ballad, not dissimilar to At the Drive-In's "Invalid Litter Dept.". It's the track with the least screaming and the first part with an excellent heavy guitar break is superb but it descends into a bit of an overly pretentious mire of gentle guitar playing, meandering along until it eventually disappears completely. Still the overly long end of the song only sets us up for the almighty crash of "Feed Your Cat to a Cobra". Again unrelenting to begin with before progressing to a more restrained conclusion. "Oh Faithless", or "the song that follows 'Feed Your Cat to a Cobra'" is also a superb effort, again more restrained than some of the efforts on the album. "Please Fire Me" is a bit shapeless with overly anarchic vocals but suddenly breaks into a superb descending chord run, gradually fading out. Cardamone whispers "it gets better than this I swear" and the rumbling bass-line of the superlative "Keep Your Eyes Peeled" follows on. A truly inspirational break from one song to the next and one of the best moments on the whole album. What "gets better than this"? The album or the emotional strife of the protagonist? One of life's many unanswered questions. "Keep Your Eyes Peeled" is one of the best songs on the album sounding like what I imagine the Cure sound like given I haven't heard much of their work. It magnificently replicates the gloomy desperation of Joy Division's finest works, slowly building up into a superb crescendo. Unfortunately the crescendo ends abruptly and is replaced by an ill-fitting riff and shapeless vocals. Still the first four minutes or so of the song make it stand out as one of the best cuts. It's successor, "Best Two Out of Three" is also fucking great. The would-be title track (they changed the name during production) "Rape of the Holy Mother" is one of the oddest but yet most typical tracks on here. It starts out as what most people wouldn't even call music with incomprehensible screaming and anarchic, distorted guitars before settling into a riff-driven groove over which someone (presumably Cardamone) recites a spoken word passage about the "evils" of music criticism. Hmm, if I took their word as gospel this page would be rather obsolete but then I take no-one's word as gospel, except my own, so fuck the lot of you. The final track, "SPMC", is probably the worst on here. Like "In Lieu" it goes on for an eternity, eleven minutes, and lacks any real structure apart from the odd repeating riff thrown in the mix. Still a logical conclusion to the album, I guess, but not the one I wanted to hear. It seems that, like At The Drive-In, post-hardcore bands have problems ending albums. Post-hardcore? What's it mean anyway? Good fucking music and that's all you need to know.

It has taken three years for LA's dirtiest rockers The Icarus Line to follow-up their much-ignored debut Mono. During that time they left their original independent label, Crank!, and signed to the major label V2. There is not much room for original punk sentiment these days and certainly I have no problem with supposedly rebellious anti-authoritarian bands getting their beans from labels owned by global corporations. It is the music that matters, after all. Although Mono received favourable press coverage it was pretty clear that not many people actually bought it (despite my over-enthusiastic arse-kissing a few years ago). Therefore the hope second time around is that the two forces combine to produce a rock album that again blows away its listeners but this time is sufficiently well promoted and distributed to ensure both the band and their new record label make some money out of it. Again this album received favourable reviews from all the major music magazines in the UK and again I think it is a rather neat little rock album so all that is left is for you suckers to actually start buying it. Frustratingly, this album shows signs of a massive improvement over its predecessor, with a much more commercial sheen turning some of the songs into absolute rock'n'roll monsters that simply pound the opposition into submission, but, on the other hand, it is plagued by inconsistency, with the other half of the set struggling to get out of a murky mire of lo-fi noise. In simple terms, they wrote half an album of amazing songs and then topped it up with some not-very-well-written songs. The greatest improvement over the last record is in the vocal talents of singer Joe Cardamone. Whereas on Mono he was an incomprehensible blur of spittle-stained rage - angry for sure but not altogether coherent - on this album he has morphed into the closest thing one can get to a precise clone of Iggy Pop without pumping money into a genetics labatory. Cardamone sneers, snarls and slurs his way through the entire album in a way that's ne'er been heard since the unhinged perfection of the Stooges' Fun House. Instead of just ranting and screaming the brilliantly debauched lyrics like "live life like a vampire" and "tonight... take off all of your clothes" he sneers and snarls them out with intoxicating coolness, and nothing beats the lascivious leer of "why can't I get some for free?" that caps off the brutally brilliant "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers". Indeed, as is so often the case, the album starts wonderfully strongly, thereby enticing the proposition that this is going to be the best rock'n'roll album for years, before getting bogged down in angry-but-rambling dirges. The tightness of the evil-Stones-style rockers "Party the Baby Off" and the superb "Spike Island" obviously show the potential within the band to take on their heroes' mantle but they then hit the buffers with train-wrecks like "Kiss Like Lizards" and "White Devil". Opener "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers" is probably coasting towards the title of being the best rock'n'roll song released this year and before you are even allowed to reflect in its full majesty the band launch into the ferocious two-minute blast of "Spit on it". Iggy Pop is no doubt woken from his mid-afternoon nap at the old people's home by the sound of his former glories being at least matched, if not bettered, by the overwhelming blast of "On the Lash"'s screamed climax. It is a shame such highlights only make up a third or so of the record and the album just about reaches an acceptably high standard thanks to the meandering centre-piece "Getting Bright at Night" which succeeds more in making the album flow than as an individual epic. Just a bit more attention to writing more proper songs, rather than trying to immaturely make as much noise as possible, would have seen this album hit the heights that it appears to be striving towards. The band obviously feel a sense of loyalty to their original scene and influences but no-one ever got big by thinking small. I could go on but such frustrations are instantly forgotten in a heady rush of pure, primal rock'n'roll when "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers" first kicks in.

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Email me at: jackfeeny@yahoo.co.uk