You get that feeling – don’t you? – when an album starts off with an actual intro track that there will be a deeper meaning behind the rest of these intense examples of straight down the line Scottish style guitar led indie pop brought into being by Laurence and the Slab Boys.
So, with something approaching cinematic grandeur, “Mushroom” duly points the tiller at the combined lands of fatalism and nihilism and, with but a count of three, yet more bleakness soon follows in “Do For Diamonds”. Expect not smiles and sunshine as there will always be a grey cloud on this band’s horizon. That’s a direction for you.
“K.E.O.” rolls out of dry dock with the kind of guitar thrashing that might otherwise suggest the onset of a jaunty boy meets girl song. Well, not here as a bout of neo realism takes things on a lemming style trip to the cliff edge and, by the time you get not to Phoenix but “Space Dream #2”, a Deacon Blue moment has hit you square between the ears. That’s almost enough to make you smile.
That’s it. In amongst all that downbeat, driven by torment, relentlessness, there is that undeniable, and vaguely disturbing, fact that Larry Reid sounds like Ricky Ross. Or, at least, what Ricky Ross would sound like if he had ever learned to drink without using a straw. So, while this album is no disgrace to its creators, you have to wonder just what the, no doubt even darker, purpose behind its inception was. I think somebody just sunk that ship called Dignity.