Club Fandango

Somewhere in the cracks on the grimy, beer-splashed and fag-end strewn floor of the Church Of Mother-Fucking Rock And Roll are a ragtag crew of cathartic chaos-bringers, musical magicians with their wands misshapen and their guitars set to kill. Seizure-inducing blast-beats and brain-melting melodies delivered faster than a jackhammer up the shitter in some fucked-up Korean extreme flick: these are the jewels in their rusted crowns, still glittering, still brilliant. An Albatross are the kings of these men of wonder, amazement, befuddlement; men who make another dance so out of time it’d come as a surprise if said moves didn’t generate a black hole down the front, sucking attendees in from left, right and centre, crushing their bones like sea salt in a grinder, spitting blood like a malfunctioning SodaStream.

The Pennsylvania-spawned quintet do not fuck around; introductions and spaces for breath are needless follies: these songs come at all and sundry harder and faster harder and faster, the boards beneath our feet groaning under their weight; Eddie sings and screams and beats drums and climbs speakers and hangs by his boots from a rail almost certainly placed above the stage for reasons other than allowing a performer to play Batman on other peoples’ time. He shoves the microphone into his crotch and goes at it like a topless, drunk and dumb groupie is willing to receive; sweat doesn’t trickle so much as leap from his features, which contort throughout as a succession of songs – ‘songs’ in the ears of the conservative many blissfully unaware of the joys of music as razor-edged as this – from Blessphemy… are executed in a truly electrifying manner.

I’m pounding my palm on the PA, grossly out of time and not caring, while always making sure my escape route, should _he_ turn nasty, is clear and well lit. I’m smiling from here, this ear, to here, the other; I’m concluding, after just two or three offerings – that’s two or three minutes, then – that leaving Battles (up t’road at the Scala) a little early was officially A Good Idea.

Music like this can’t really be explained in words; it takes noises, gurgles from the gut and moans from the decaying soul, to express what An Albatross set alight in a man. Sign language is reduced to fits, lip-reading to a slew of unprintable expletives. One hand on a hip and the other aloft: a Broadway pose for the cameras. This is what An Albatross make a man want to do, on a rainy evening, in the middle of a three-lane one-way main drag. It’s celebration and exuberance, the exorcising of discotheque demons who don’t ever realise they’re beat – they return night after night, and the process repeats. Dance, monkeys! Or we’ll slice you.

And, as the curtain rail doesn’t fall, the cracks beneath the mainstream grow a little wider. The Church’s doors are hanging off their hinges: make good your escape or strap yourself in and grin and bare it… all.