Chemtrails’ triumph lies in not being just the final product of somebody else’s jigsaw.
Not everyone is as open as Chemtrails are about sharing their inspirations, no matter what the source.
Talking about Detritus Andronicus, the single which preceded this, their third album The Joy Of Sects, the band were happy to refer to what TV sitcom Peep Show described as ‘Gaddaafi’s law’, the mantra of which put simply is: ‘If it feels good, do it.’
This didn’t work out so well for the dictator it shares a name with, but the Manchester-based quartet are happy enough using it to unleashing their various weapons of mass musical destruction. Detritus… is their recipe in microcosm, both the sound of having a good time whilst simultaneously keeping calm and carrying on amongst the perma-landslide of, well, important people being twats.
Somewhere between post-funk and post-punk, on the song itself the hollers of vocalists Mia Lust and Laura Orlova give, as you suspect they are intended, a cartoonish foreground to lyrics which here and throughout deal variously with alienation, the absurd, the human condition, the impending apocalypse and gender identity.
As much as the occasional piss-taking might try and hide it, the record itself does mark a step forward for the quartet, in working with producer Margo Broom (Big Joanie, Fat White Family) and equally being the first having not been recorded in somebody’s lounge.
This shouldn’t be taken as a proxy for having the edges knocked off, however. On Bang Bang they take a suitably peculiar (and funny) hike through the backwoods of glam, whilst Mushroom Cloud Nine sounds like it escaped from some post-grunge timeslip and Pink Whale is cheesy aquarium pop whose defining quality is that it has absolutely no shame.
As you may have guessed by now, there’s a really handy game here of lining up all the obvious musical elements (garage, punk, surf pop, trashy psychedelia, 60’s girl groups) with all the influences (The B-52’s, Blondie, Los Bitchos, Death Valley Girls, The Slits), a mutual smorgasbord which means no track can be successfully got through without at least three lightbulb moments of realisation.
The triumph here though lies in not being just the final product of somebody else’s jigsaw – and here The Joy Of Sects manages to evade being captured by itself, helped out by an admirable determination to exploit pop’s 21st century turn for the weird.
By this token, when all the elements align it’s the soundtrack for an eyebrow-shaving dance party you gatecrashed but didn’t have the sense to leave before somebody broke out the absinthe.
Need to hear proof? Superhuman Superhighway rumbles along like an asteroid from Planet Claire exploding, guitar riffs and wide-eyed statement lyrics a go-go, whilst closer Endless Stream Of The Bizarre looks sideways at a society filled with, ‘The perverse little creatures we are’, a hymn to the cages we all lock behind us every time we’re in each other’s company.
Escapism without the actual breaking out is no fun at all however, especially with the real villains getting away with it in plain sight. The Joy Of Sects’ best moments finger the bad guys and sound good, Sycophant’s Paradise like a cosmic ray gun of disapproval, whilst Join Our Death Cult is a rallying call for the meta-jerks to which you can use to stomp all over their evil ways – or simply go on and look back down at your phone.
Happy endings remain optional. Chemtrails didn’t really get here by any orthodox way but here they are, cool sounding flies in your ointment, bringing their apocalypse row.
