The Screamers
In A Better World

THE REVIEW

I'll try......

Among the fathers of West Coast Punk, researchers in their own Dadaist way, of a song form outside the canon of traditional instrumentation, precursors of the most violent Synth Punk, remembered as performers of shows as bizarre as they were fiery and irreverent, idolized by the Los Angeles scene of the time, yet they never managed to produce a record!

Roughly, this is the business card of the Screamers.

Fortunately, “Extravertigo” took it upon itself in this double CD to collect more or less everything the Band recorded during concerts, brief studio sessions, and various demos.

Keyboard, synth, drums, voice, anger, and apocalyptic doses of healthy defiance combined with the desire to distinctly stand out from the current to which they belong and at the same time be fully part of it!

It's Melba "Tommy Gear" Toast's keyboard and Paul Roessler's synth that create an amphetamine magma, a child of the Los Angeles tradition, where Seeds-like synthetic riffs become pure panacea for compulsive, simple, and dyslexic Manzarek-like keyboards, all filtered through the teachings of the New York electronic and psychedelic school starting with Silver Apple, passing through Red Crayola (I think of “organized chaos”) and ending with U.S.A. for the “arty” research at its base, all brought to extreme consequences producing, hyper-accelerated epilepsies that counterbalance falls into depressed and claustrophobic hells.

It is in the hallucinatory scream (“In a Better World” and many other pieces) or in the desperate prayer (“I Wanna Love” or in the gem "122 Hours Of Fear") of Tomata du Plenty that the synergies of the Band reach total expressive completeness, leading them to the incredible result of achieving an Art Punk that finds its paternity in the Central European region (I think of Kraftwerk, Neu, and Faust in “I'm a Mensch”, the very first CAN of “Delay” in “Matar Dolores”), British reminiscences (the Wire in “Magazine Love”, Joy Division in “Punish or Be Damned” but also Fall) and coast-to-coast flights respecting and at the same time destroying the “rock” tradition of two continents.

Without mincing words, whatever they had been able to record would have been a masterpiece!

Forward, Far Ahead!

Chapeau.