Subtle Turnhips - Redhair With Some LP

This French trio has occupied a sentimental spot in my brain for a rather unsentimental release, a single on Hozac from years back called “Fuck The Power, Fuck The People,” and that spot was where the icepick of their jagged, unmusical spume of rage had hit me over and over. No further releases were forthcoming until now; I bought their album Terd but on the shelf it sits, daring me to crack the plastic. The all-inclusive approach over at Australia’s Homeless label to cover music not from its homeland thus brings us this new LP, their fourth by any count, had been antagonizing me in a similar way. This is not the first time I’ve attempted to write about it, but their music, while simple enough to comprehend if you are in any way attuned to a post-punk era deconstruction of the guitar/bass/drums trio, contains far too many qualities to allow it to go down easily.

They sound flattened, if not compressed, a deeper dimension of their sound intentionally held back, which carries over to their trying approach to riffs and rhythm. For a garage-sounding band, the Turnhips eschew anything directly catchy, and their songs lay bunched and unsorted like dirty laundry piling up on the floor. They sound pinched, if that makes sense, only to release that pressure and spill gouts of their essence all over. In moments they draw comparison to the Country Teasers in terms of their ramshackle approach, but pointed towards the Swell Maps instead of narcotics, like they really want to be a different and quantitatively better band, but factors have come into play that have prevented this, so they are this, this sort of charmingly wasted mess of a band that scrawls and scrapes its way through a bunch of songs with intent if not purpose, sleazy poise in place of character.

Garish cover art just like all their others. I will recommend this, just because I think these gents have been on a path over the past 12 or so years that few would follow, and you should be curious enough to at least look in that direction. - Doug Mosurock, Still Single