The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster

If my heart were a bull and my body were a china shop then The Martini Henry Rifles have just draped my ribcage in red rags. If my brain were a Roman Candle then The Martini Henry Rifles have just doused the fuse in WD40. My soul owes more to Sean McLusky than it initially thought. Whilst looking (and sounding) like a horrific genetic cross-breeding accident between The Fall, Trencher and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, TMHR create such a chaotically exhilarating racket that it takes about three songs to realise that their drummer hasn’t turned up (perhaps the reason for there being no ‘…And Then We Hit A Truck’ or ‘God Made Me Destroy These Infidels’ tonight?). They come from The Liars’ school of song-titling (‘Run Jimmy Run Run Run You Fucker’ being the most comprehensible here) and they play their instruments like they’re hanging onto them for dear life. Like the bassist’s trampled Flock of Seagulls look you’d shrug at the concept but would be astounded by the actual results. During another two-minute thrash-electro-noise-core number the chief shouter scales the speaker stacks and lands in time to press the button on the keyboard that says ‘White Noise and Arcade Game Sound Effects’. For those who piss themselves laughing every time Slipknot are called ‘Alternative Rock’.

What if The Datsuns worshipped Sabbath instead of Zeppelin? What if Jack White relied on helium instead of oxygen and was secretly the lovechild of Wayne Coyne and Alice Cooper? Well, maybe they’d be in the same sort of league as My Red Cell. Playing in front of a huge statue of the number 13 wrapped in tin foil (to “test their bad luck” apparently, or perhaps to promote new single ‘The 13 In My 31’), they play songs that sound like almost anything off ‘Elephant’’ with added bass (particularly ‘Knock Me Down’), have a drummer set on ‘spin cycle’ and use riffs that Deep Purple probably left down the back of the sofa. ‘In A Cage On Prozac’ is the most infectious of the set, its pounding bassline and driving rhythm being the basis for a continual chorus, and deserves to act as a one-finger salute from the kids in the sticks to whoever’s arguing. Several chorus of “fuck love and hate / Let’s masturbate” later, plus an a cappella version of the aforementioned Zep’s ‘Black Dog’, and it’s assured that they’re young, dumb and full of…er…enthusiasm.

Early fans of The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster may feel alarmed at the feeling of them ‘selling out’, but if it’s a worry of them becoming ‘soft’ then there’s no need for concern. Exhibit A: “What do we do with the puppy dog stares? / What do we do with boys like you?” they snarl, before responding with “We put them in a pot / And we THROW THEM ON THE FIRE!” No further questions, Your Honour. Yes, the infamous car that gave them their name is nowhere to be seen, but the group still adorns the sort of neo-Vaudeville get-up and severely back-combed barnets that even Robert Smith would baulk at for being to outre. Whey-faced lead voxman Guy McKnight may be actually trying to croon some of the lyrics (“I wanna sing like Sinatra” indeed) but there are still moments from new songs where he imitates the noise of a broken vacuum cleaner and mumbles the sort of threats last heard in ‘Alex’. There may be the arrival of… are you sitting down?… an acoustic guitar, but it is played like a hand-me-down from The Clash and does not make their edge any more blunt. From the new material ‘I Could Be An Angle’ is the most refined and ‘Mister Mental’ is the most tuneful, but the host of other songs recorded in the desert contain the moody, malicious magnificence that TEMBD have become synonymous with. ‘Giant Bones’ and ‘Morning Has Broken’ feels like the group are speaking in tongues but you somehow understand, whilst ‘Celebrate Your Mother’ and ‘Psychosis Safari’ are already classified as hysteric gothabilly classics. Guy spends hardly an entire song onstage, each time striding forward into the adoring throng, screaming in faces, flicking a blood-curdling stare, dribbling over heads or just crowd-surfing as the band whip up the required dark heart of guitar frenzy. Trust us, you still wouldn’t want to look at them the funny down a dark alley, and that’s the only way you’d have it. Rrrrrrrrrrrrr…