THERAPY?
Crooked Timber
DR2/Global MusicTrack listing:
01. The Head That Tried to Strangle Itself
02. Enjoy the Struggle
03. Clowns Galore
04. Exiles
05. Crooked Timber
06. I Told You I Was Ill
07. Somnambulist
08. Blacken the Page
09. Magic Mountain
10. Bad Excuse For Daylight
American fans could be forgiven for thinking THERAPY? had taken their vestigial question mark and headed off into the alt-rock sunset years ago. But the band's been at it this whole time, and "Crooked Timber", their tenth studio album, is one feral, cranky beast indeed. Co-produced by Andy Gill of GANG OF FOUR, it's a noisy, blatting squall heavy on the bass guitar and dripping by turns with sardonic bitterness and surprising pathos.
When I say "heavy on the bass guitar," I don't mean the record has some respectable low-end; I mean they made the bass louder than the guitar! It's an odd production choice, but it ends up adding an off-kilter, slightly menacing tone to even the most accessible tracks on "Crooked Timber". The guitar accents and embellishes the driving, churning bass lines, with a highly-wound snare clanging through the mix and Andy Cairns's mostly unadorned vocal wandering through the clangor. The overall effect seems to pull a page from the playbook of everyone from BARKMARKET to JAWBOX to KILLING JOKE to JESUS LIZARD, but still retains enough of the teeth-grinding paranoia and liverish eye on society that THERAPY? are known for even at their most commercially palatable.
The heaviest, starkest tracks work best — from the punishing, swirling "Clowns Galore" to the naked and emotional "I Told You I Was Ill", to the angular, crawling "Bad Excuse For Daylight". Really, every track is a keeper, with the possible exception of droning ten-minute instrumental "Magic Mountain" (why banish the perfectly harrowing "Bad Excuse For Daylight" to live after such a meandering throwaway?). The THERAPY? stock in trade — intelligent, dark-hearted, infused with gallows humor and a sighing pessimism — comes through, though, and after a few listens, the instrumentation begins to make perfect sense. Indeed, you wouldn't want these bleak, arch post-millennial anthems any other way. Import-only for the States at the moment, but well worth seeking out.