What's Your Rupture? (label)
09 November 2020 (released)
09 November 2020
Who do you get when former Huggy Bear member Chris Rowley teams up (ending a 25 year absence from the frontline of punk-polemics) with ex-Male Bonding members Kevin Hendrick and (one-time pen pal) John Arthur Webb who also invite teenage drummer Sonny (no surname forth given) into the set-up? The abrasively angry yet artfully antagonistic Adulkt Life, that’s who.
What do you also get if you combine their collective experiences and recollected escapades into ten tracks of tightly wound tumult and (in)tense revolt? The album ‘Book of Curses’ that’s what.
Huggy Bear were an art-rock noise-poise outfit that existed from 1991 to 1994, a mixed-gendered ensemble (‘girl-boy revolutionaries’) that was inspired by the US riot grrrl movement and the incendiary group The Nation of Ulysses. The group channelled their own politico-philosophies and dismay at how the once potent independent scene in London had evolved into the moribund wet blanket bland-branded corporate catch-all ‘indie’. Languor is an energy.
Male Bonding are a dormant experimental three-piece who have been on the Sub Pop label as well as self-releasing several albums and E.P.s., the most recent being 2016’s ‘Headache’.
Together as Adulkt Life they demonstrate that music as protest is protest music (at less than half an hour for the attention distracted) and that political pontificating and punk-inspired outrage is inter-generational. You’re never (and need ever be) too old to rage and rail with rancour against the iniquities and inequities that are on display every day. Passivity equals apathy.
Describing their album’s aesthetic and sound as ‘Cold War bubblegum’ (the glimpse of promise through the dispersing mushroom cloud), a label that (de)ranges from all-out guttural-guitar thrash (‘Stevie K)’ to the moody-synthesiser assisted standout ‘Taking Hits’. The latter finds Rowley blithely outline and delineate his wails and travails, as he bemoans ‘nothing in my fridge’ he delivers a fine metaphor for the cold emptiness of a hopeless void.
The prescient ‘Room Context’ and ‘New Curfew’ (written in 2019 yet its foresight today is strikingly menacing) tell of forced confinement at the behest of contradictory edicts and how the sound of sirens outside could mean many myriad things nowadays (‘I don’t know what to feel’ is the rueful refrain). Add mandatory mask-wearing as preventative shields that invariably inhibit and prohibit it’s a bleak existence of housebound atomisation.
Thankfully we still have music to offer existential escapes and creative cocoons.
