…And The Hangnails unleashed their third album ‘Rut’ on July 25th.
There’s a difference between ‘release’ and ‘unleash’; the former would indicate a typical, typecast adopted method of allowing listeners to digest and fall in love a record.
The latter indicates a total takeover of heart, mind, soul and body, when once the victim has fallen to a record as punk, potent and powerful as this one, will later be found as a pile of mush, their remains a small heap of rubbish thanks to the utterly adulterated teenage-angst frenzy that surrounds and energizes this rock, full of fuck you guitar-driven pop-dining-room floor-fillers. Full of fascination.
Never a band for going totally crazy when it comes to studio trickery (their first album was recorded in four days on a H2 Zoom dictaphone: screw you Jack White analogue tech), …And The Hangnails are a duo which cherishes the good-old days, when any number of members or instruments that exceeded four was sinful. Take opening number ‘Everybody’s Luck’; the guitars are loud as fuck, the drums chaotic and clumsy like they should be and vocals strong but hovering just beyond the line of when the pubescent nature of our vocal chords becomes cute, confident and humorous.
Humorous would be a good word to use when describing their sound – not in a demeaning or discrediting way – but humorous as in the devilish nature we all desire to return to, the simpler times of swearing when you didn’t know what the words meant. It’s amusing, engaging, entertaining. It never seems to dip or deter in quality because of how basic the format is.
So, why bother to ‘Fix It’ when the run so far has been triumphant. Touring with The Damned, Deap Vally, Drenge and The Fall must surely scream success. Second tune in and the voice seems to be more clear and flowing, the guitars just as broken but the tune itself never falling out of time despite its speed and inability to see clearly because of the static noise that distorts almost all the senses.
The complexity of the tunes is so simplistic it is near-enough impossible not to enjoy. More spit, sticks and stones are thrown at all ex-lovers’ windows as ‘Say It To The Old’ enters the fold. Constructed loose with elasticised guitar introductions that can only derive from a hand plus five fingers, heavy-metal machismo meets jangle-pop flamboyancy. The vocals, harmonised, echo from mountaintops, screeching and screaming, a time to let loose with a can of spray-paint proliferating political slogans on the walls of important monuments in a city you hate.
When exploring the anarchistic side to life, it would be a wise move to let your hair down and raise fists with pride to tunes such as ‘The Trouble You Start’, with its cathartic rollercoaster ride of a climax and ‘Meet Me By The River’, opening with ghostly atmospheric noises and marching band drums that lead to the entrances of the end, with militant guitar stabs slashing any opposition in the path of our dynamic protagonists. Detailing the narrative of a night that can only belong to the lives that live it, it howls with honesty but bites bigger the closer negativity invades an otherwise totally positive space.
Do so, and you will receive a ‘Bleeding Noise’, a stand-out track on the album that imagines illuminated, smiling skeletons dancing on a bar surface in a local haunt in the middle of nowhere. This bluesy anthem snakes its way in the tallest of grass, in the darkest of nights, a stunning vision complimenting an equally superb song.
They remain convinced that making use with what we have and not missing the excess is the real way to make great music. Their profiles state on the topic of interests: writing, gigging and recording – the three crucial mechanisms that make any band tick, a plan and personal preference that skips past the unessentials resulting in noisy, cathartic and brilliant bombasts of melody. Anything that goes beyond and steps outside of that territory is unknown, uninteresting and otherworldly to the insider circles.
Creating in a prolific and hammering manner tunes anyone can relate to.
(Ryan Walker)