It's nearly 25 years since Nick Cave formed The Birthday Party. Nottingham's Isle Of Ewe sit on the same axis as the aforementioned Aussie legends, The Jesus Lizard and whisper it... The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster.
Opening with 'Go Get A Shovel', which sounds like an apocalypse before it's just about to cave in, twisting and turning along a myriad of root canals similar to Cave's epochal 'Junkyard' masterpiece, Isle Of Ewe demonstrate a penchant that reaches beyond delving into the past to construct the future, instead merely carving up its entrails and recycling them in some ceremonial act of sick pleasure.
'This Isn't It... But It Might Be' starts with a bassline derived from the most cataclysmic entries in Steve Albini's little black book before dissolving into a quagmire of debauchery and despair Guy McKnight would be proud of.
'So I Swallowed a Fly' offers a grand finale eerily reminiscent of the Cramps at their most aesthetically turgid, while the vocals borrow a lilt-de-Homme off 'Songs From The Deaf' before wrapping more subliminally corrupt Tracy Pew riffs around its hallowed body.
After the initial flurry of commercial interest conjured up by people like Marilyn Manson and Cradle Of Filth (who I hasten to add, Isle Of Ewe have little, if nothing, in common with), the graveyard scene invented by people like Cave and Peter Murphy (of Bauhaus fame) is once again flourishing in the underground, safe in the knowledge that a whole new breed of ghoulish inhabitants are pushing up daisies and reducing one's wits' ends to smithereens in the process.
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6Dom Gourlay's Score