Follow the yellow brick road. Do a Reggie Perrin and run into the sea. Knock it out of the park by ordering extra salad on your Big Kahuna burger and then do the right thing and fall straight into the noise rock abyss with My Wife’s An Angel and their inspirationally named album “Keep Honking I’m About To Fucking Kill Myself”. I did and I’m still here. But where is here? Is this Philadelphia? Or is it the virtual version of somewhere else?
My Wife’s An Angel are indeed from the city of brotherly love but love clearly isn’t number one on their agenda. Their music, instead, probably makes perfect sense in some reality where guitars are forever on the rampage chasing drums that are sort of permanently disconnected from the machine that makes things do the four on the floor thing. Sense, as they say, is for squids. Soundbites abide, or maybe they were just echoes of a reality that can’t possibly be this one, whilst some voice sits out front recanting stories from the urban experience as if true social commentary could ever be disguised by theatrical presentation and sonic brutality. I don’t get to use worlds like maelstrom much these days but that word is about as accurate a description of these ten songs as my simple heart is likely to give and, talking of matters related to the lexicon, there is, remarkably, no shortage of words of confusion and anger that constantly swirl around in overdriven anguish as if to entice the listener towards a deep dive into the spiritual abyss that is today.
Noise rock doesn’t generally go down further than power chord overload but, make no mistake, there is meat on the bones of this album. “Keep Honking I’m About To Fucking Kill Myself” might well end on a finger in the air yet only a fool would imagine that all that they hear was merely synthetic nihilism generated for the veneration of those who wish to drown in beer. Our collective nightmares are walking the streets of here and now and My Wife’s An Angel know it. So, do the smart thing and play this one loud enough to induce an epiphany.
Available from Bandcamp on vinyl, cassette and CD so let’s get physical.