THERAPY? - A BRIEF CRACK OF LIGHT
Blast Records

Opening up with thunderous new single Living in the Shadow of a Terrible Thing, Therapy?’s new album doesn’t set out to take any prisoners. This crunching, grooving number is an impressive opener to an album that neither tries to be traditional or cutting-edge, thank God. Instead, the band simply do their own thing.

That thing is a heady mix of heavy guitar riffs, funky rhythms and time-changes that blend and blur genre conventions. Not quite metal (old or Nu), certainly not indie and definitely not pop – though with elements of all those styles – this is an impressive collection of tunes, only too happy to slide into left field oddness (as with the distorted closing section of Plague Bell) or even flirt with touches of quirky pop and punk (the instrumental Marlow, a pleasingly schizophrenic little number that you wouldn’t be surprised to hear performed by a Japanese band). Ghost Trio, on the other hand, mixes very heavy riffs with a Sixties psychedelic feel, while Why Turbulence is solid downtuned malevolence.

There are less impressive moments - The Buzzing is a chaotic affair that almost collapses under the weight of its own pretensions – Zappa flavoured avant-garde music is not the band’s strong point – and Stark Raving Sane is similarly too much of an art-rock run-through to really work. But these are minor distractions from the whole.

Finishing up on the album’s slowest number, the vocoder-vocalled, bleakly epic Ecclesiastes, this is pretty impressive stuff from a band who could have easily sat back and lived on past glories. That they have created such a complex, original and occasionally difficult album is a credit to them.

DAVID FLINT

BUY IT NOW (UK)

BUY IT NOW (USA)