Singapore Sling
Life Is Killing My Rock'n'Roll

I fed the piece Curse, Curse, Curse to a group of friends who weren't looking for anything else. I wondered if, stripped of reverb and ghostly voices, it turned out to be a great street rock track. And so it was. They sounded like the early L.A. Guns with a song that could have fit perfectly in their early work. The track is here, consider a faster basic tempo and you'll understand that I'm not saying something so hairy and absurd. Now, I don't want to shift the discussion to a terrain that's truly too far off. But I wanted to point out that when you experiment to understand why interesting and disgustingly, damnably, damnably, banally cool formations always orbit around Anton Newcombe, you always reach a conclusion. He has a long ear.

I hate, damn I hate them, those who write recipe-reviews like add 1/4 of Pink Floyd, add 77/23 of the Stooges, 2 parts of Tony Tammaro, and then shake it all up, you'll have the masterpiece. If only it were that simple. Around Newcombe gravitate human beings who know how to deal with music because they have pure talent, above all, and because they know how to dip the ladle in the cauldrons of fresh and still fatty milk of many genres. All these guys have a reason, they never leave you indifferent. I think of the Asteroid #4 who range from the Floyd to the Suede to the acid years in the peace of the senses with great skill. And I think of our guys who, instead, are meaner and seem those skinny guys from Millwall, 1980s heroin addicts, proud flaunters of an unwritten rulebook on how you should behave when you're buying stuff in the suburbs. And maybe something more. Like in the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the chicks warmed by such a mother hen, also for the Singapore Sling, the inlays, the finishes, the chiseling and fine work, the gentle shivers, the strings touched with delicacy before the storm of scrap metal are numerous and significant, properly lubricated to shoot together in a great noise/shoegaze orgasm. These guys are from Iceland and represent its more breathless, sweaty, abstinent side: that of the chemical powders where a gram makes you sweat a liter of fat.

The Singapore Sling in opposition to the metaphysical soundscapes depicted by Sigur Ros or Mùm. And I like this. I like the feeling of thirst, of oxyacetylene flame right under the skin that their music provides. They move calmly and damnably as if they have the Velvet Underground experience behind them, wild, acrobatic, and ragged like in some assumptions of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Above all, the Singapore Sling must have had many ear-to-ear sexual encounters with Psychocandy and the early works of the Sonic Youth. Because they sound influenced as much as possible by those caustic environments, where you don't know if the singer is dead or not, where you don't know if making so much noise is a crane lifting rusty car carcasses or a simple guitar plugged into a thousand pedals that break through.

Class, malice, rigor mortis, and fury in an album that owes everything to new wave, post-punk, gothic rock, noise, shoegaze, and psychedelia. Maybe even to some prostitute in the outskirts of Glasgow. Or Reykjavik, as you prefer.