Mush

All the way from the Yorkshire (he)artlands of Leeds, quartet (offensive) Mush are here to issue a manifesto. Sick and tired of existing in a society where ‘being’ is reduced to rote engagements, the re-enactment of rehearsed activities again … and again and where the cost of living is the ultimate price to pay.

This call to arms, '3D Routine', advises thus ‘go forth and send the ladder down, peel back the tunnel, dimensionally challenged 2D suckers’. If you are one of those said suckers then you’re better off ceasing all forms of engagement right now.

Still here? Good, we continue.

Raw, spare, decisive and incisive, these twelve signals of sound set out to articulate the ‘modern’ world and all its empty accoutrements. From ‘Coronation Chicken’ to ‘Existential Dread’, ‘Alternative Facts’ to ‘Poverty Pornography’ this is an album for ‘NOW’, of ‘NOW’, is ‘NOW’. The structural feelings subjected onto the First World have rendered its inhabitants passive conveyor belts of apathy, acquiescence and artificially-disseminated autonomy.

No more does that have to be the case. All aspiring culture vultures oughta listen as Mush channel Sparks’s ‘out-there’ orchestrations (vox-man Hyndman apes Russell Mael’s histrionic throat-theatrics with an echo of Bobcat Goldthwaite’s maniacal screech; his utterings uneasily discernible at times) and quotidian (ab)normalities all set to propulsive brish, brash guitars and percussion concussion.

‘Revising my fee’ is a short, sharp, shock to the earwaves that stretches and spreads long after you think it’s finished. An existential excavation of the trials and travails of ‘living’, how every form of action is a monetised experience and necessitates bartering and negotiating at the expense of the soul. As Hyndman adroitly expressly exposes: ‘meal-deal critique, aspirational creed’ the illusions of spiritual betterment and psychic nourishment are latent in everything. The diagnosis is a vacuous and vapid reality.

The wiry, scabrous and humourous ‘Eat the etiquette’ is a postmodern breakdown takedown of the social mores and niceties inflicted upon ‘civilised’ society. Perform and conform.

‘Fruits of the Happening’ and the nine-minute mazy and meandering ‘Alternative Facts’ blend The Fall’s early wonky-skronk shimmering with fellow Mancunian Martin Bramah’s The Blue Orchids’ reality-bitten psychedelia.

As they say themselves, disregard protocol, avoid airs and graces, ditch the social codes and simply eat the etiquette.