Here’s the thing. I love the three minute pop song and greatly admire the ability to create memorable melodies but The Sediment Club just aren’t that kind of band. Equally, another band drowning themselves in angular proto punk influences should have left me cold but, surprisingly, their album “Stucco Thieves” didn’t.
Why was that? Well, despite their fondness for arthouse discordance, it was undeniable that The Sediment Club were a band who had channelled all that urban angst and misdirected energy of a misspent youth into a set of almost theatrical songs that managed to sound different whilst still giving a voice to all the permanently tormented ghosts that inhabit the city of the lost. I had – as a substitute for self-flagellation - been listening to lot of metal recently and had, consequently. nearly overdosed on cliché yet The Sediment Club, despite dredging all those time honoured New York City underground influences, sidestepped the blind repetition of past glories and leapt instead forward on a mission to be remembered. The fractured songs on this album have little mainstream appeal – they haven’t yet, after all, invented a computer that do what this band can – but that doesn’t really matter as what The Sediment Club deliver is nothing less a hammer blow to the monosyllabic musical monolith that has trapped us all in autotuned land.
Listen again to “Stucco Thieves” and all that general untidiness and apparent randomness gains a near hypnotic charm that transcends the trivialities of my less than humble opinion. This isn’t easy, or even particularly approachable music, but this album is nonetheless something to both experience in the now and ponder upon later.