Album Review: Creep Show – Mr. Dynamite


Mr Dynamite



There’s a lot to be said for dirt; the way it gets underneath your fingernails, impossible to scrub off no matter how much you try.

Dirt knows that the truth is wherever you’ve had the best time of your life, it’s been there somewhere, lurking, marking its territory up your clothes, lurking in your opened-up pores and reminding you of how permeable the membrane between you and the outside world really is.

For John Grant, by contrast, there’s always been an air of pristine about his work, a smoothness and polished grain which has survived even his lascivious, brutally honest poetry about sex, love and self-criticism. The rebuttal is in Creep Show’s existence, a collaboration of his with Wrangler, a trio of avant-garde noise butchers consisting of producer Benge, ex-Tuung member Phil Winter and Stephen Mallinder, formerly one half of cult industrial techno pioneers Cabaret Voltaire.

Grant has quite rightly pointed out a playful obsession with what he describes as ‘theatre of the absurd’, and it’s impossible not come around to the idea that Mr. Dynamite exists as a project for the express purpose of helping the quartet to have enormous, pitch black fun. That’s a relative term of course, but having relocated to Cornwall with ‘a lifetime’s collection of drum machines and synthesisers’ to record, it seems like there really wasn’t much more for anyone to do than to make their own entertainment.

Given these piles of vintage gear everywhere and Mallinder’s long history in the field of sonic manipulation (the Cabs were one of the very first outfits to use rudimental sampling in their work back in the early 1980s) expectations might’ve been for some kind of industrial Wicker Man reimagined, but with he and Grant sharing vocal duties the results, whilst not exactly ear candy, are an intriguing mesh of analogue macabre and fringe pop art.

At one end of the spectrum lies the titular opening track, a weirdly hallucinogenic trip that uses mischievous distortion, a cod-slasher tint and a general sense of freak which introduces the record’s central character to us as a lurid techo-sprite. Fans of Mallinder’s trademark glitch will relish K Mart Johnny’s whispers, white noise and claustrophobic chatter, the collage a nightmarish throwback to the restless interrogation soundtracks of old. Here, the Dynamite character becomes sort of an MC, always just on the edge your peripheral hearing whilst hinting at personification he nearly gives him a production credit: “Mr. Dynamite is real,” he deadpans in interview, “he blows shit up.”

A ghost in the machine? Not before the YMO-nodding electro of Tokyo Underground – on which Mr. D is relegated to a croaking bit part like a cracked circuit – whilst in bursting the aesthetic open the luxuriously soulful cut Endangered Species springs eventually from its lounge lizard early passage into something you’d only hear in a darkened nightclub filled with curiously alien looking silhouettes.

Grant is clearly having a ball, sending himself up mercilessly and getting results which are as unpredictable as much as they rip up conventions of the man we thought we knew. Possibly featuring on the bipolar hip-hop of Lime Ricky (the distortion makes it guesswork) the chanteur then lands a more orthodox killer blow with the stately closer Fall, on which his delightfully noir croon is at its most phlegmatic, the celestial melodies both precise and calm as he warmly intones he’s now reassuringly ‘safe in the arms of my destiny’.

As a climax it’s a fittingly intense one, the solitary moment of Mr. Dynamite’s lysergic fantasy which feels like serious business. It’s a record that punctures the relative myths about its protagonists, swapping austerity for masks and jestering, but more than anything it’s just good old fashioned digital dirt, the sort you can’t wash away without losing something of yourself in the process.



Which part it is will depend on you.

(Andy Peterson)


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