With its seething frustration, paranoia and disenchantment with the status quo, the second album from this New York punk trio dovetails depressingly closely with the emotional tenor of the UK – and indeed proves to be quite magnificently cathartic as a result. Thrashing tinnily through lo-fi garage production, they sit somewhere between At the Drive-In’s tight soapbox screeds and Death Grips’ loose, rangy sermons, and in a lineage of right-on, pissed-off US punk stretching back to Fugazi.
Julian Cashwan Pratt is a bracing frontman, whose lyrics are beautifully anti-lyrical: all barks and stubby vowels, sketching out a horribly claustrophobic cityscape where people cling to each other like buoys. New York is a spiritual desert in Drought, Pratt sarcastically invoking the anti-English of business culture (“concerning you there’s no figuring you in”), while on Arcanum, his (partly self) disgust seeps into every corner of the song: “Visions come awake the lies and piss inside of me.” Excellent cyberpunk flourishes such as the distorted bass line of Forks and Knives, or the syncopated techno pulse of Badge Grabber, broaden the sound out from three-chord rudiments, but the most thrilling moments are the most straightforwardly punk. There’s the way Drought and Camp Orchestra – the latter inspired by a visit to Auschwitz – stage-dive into their own opening verses, or how standout track Madonna Rocket sees Pratt take the bland stock phrase “do you know what I mean?” and howl some sense back into it: his desire to be understood is desperate, and universal.
