Easy listening music. What is the point of it? After all, if you can ignore it when why waste your time listening to it. Well, you certainly won't be ignoring The Victorian English Gentlemen's Club. As we fond of saying, the Cardiff threesome's album is best played loud. Very loud.
Things start of well with "The Tales of Hermit Mark". A spirited song set in the shadows of madness; it features this band's trademark vocal punctuation in the arrangements. No doubt somebody understands exactly what this band is writing about but it sure is not the Bluesbunny. Oddball and quirky without a doubt, they go a bit (more) warped and surreal in "My Son Spells Backward". Dyslexic and dystopian all at the same time, this is not so much a song as an assault on your sanity. Grunge meets pop in "Such a Chore" and in the nightmarish "Dead Anyway". By the time "Under the Years" thundered out of the speakers, I thought I had been transported into a German Expressionist film. Hello, Nosferatu! The hypnotic "Cannonball" ends the album with a sonic storm going on in the background and, as on many of the songs on this album, Emma Daman's remarkably tidy and disciplined drumming nails the song down before it can escape and savage you.
All in all, a very reasonable album in a disturbed, Prodigy meets Talking Heads style. In some ways, they could be the twisted cousins of bands like New York's Looker but then there are those lyrics to consider. Somebody isn't taking their anti-psychotic medication…