FatCat Records (label)
06 February 2020 (released)
06 February 2020
Written in a crash-bang-wallop ten days group-proliferating members’ guitarist Rachel Aggs (Trash Kit, Sacred Paws), drummer Andrew Milk (Current Affairs), and Billy Easter (Wet Dog) knocked up ‘All or Nothing’ the follow-up to 2018’s Edwyn Collins helmed ‘The Official Body’.
Post-punk female-led acts such as The Raincoats, Kleenex/Liliput, (‘Trust in us’ also has shades of Delta 5) are clear influences and inspirations with their austere post-punk jerkiness applied to glibly delivered statements ‘as’ lyrics (‘Initiative’ especially recalls Susan Fassbender’s 1981 should’ve been a smash-hit ‘Twilight Café’). Aggs and Milk casually trade words, blithely blasé, apathetic yet never sounding bored. There’s far too much to be agitated about.
The ‘love-is/as-surveillance’ themed ‘Follow me’ has traces of Scottish Kandy-Poppers Bis, the cut-away chorus line creates a nightmarish image: ‘CCTV … obsess’ offering a critique of the lens-trained voyeurism so prevalent across the supposed ‘free world’. Privacy is an olde world notion.
‘For your pleasure’ is an anti-consumerist screed, a ditty about that the elusive gratification that taunts and teases about life’s promised meanings and delights … which will never arrive. A demystifying experience is recounted, the line ‘What you see is just what you get’ an (over) dose of reality when paralysed by the spectacle of needless consumables. A plugged void remains a void.
Shopping live up to their name. A thrifty, economical and value for money haul meets an alienating, atomising and less-than-worthwhile way to spend your leisure time. Ker-ching!
In the week of Gang of Four’s Andy Gill’s passing, this clean, lean album is a fitting testament to that epoch’s incendiary tendencies, militant manoeuvring and sparse sounds.
'Dirt behind the daydream
Dirt behind the daydream
The happy ever after
It's at the end of the rainbow'
