Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 28/07/08
Label: Mute

There's that old maxim about you never being further than a few feet away from a rat in the big city. There must be something similar about being no more than a lunar cycle or two away from the next album by The Fall. And about as routine, diligently filling the gaps in between, are bands making albums hopelessly devoted to The Fall. This cycle will continue forevermore and XX Teens are that band for the right now.

You might already know them as Xerox Teens. The photocopy giants of the same first name threw their toner out of the pram soon enough though, demanding a name-tweak and denying you the chance to ever Google them at work again. You may have also been struck flat between the art-rock temples by their cattle-prod live show at some point, or by the black comic "How To Reduce The Chances Of Being A Terror Victim" single that could have been another "Thou Shalt Always Kill" if only anyone actually heard it.

Now though, none of the above matter. The single is conspicuous by its absence and if their live show is the a la carte, or at least leftovers from the skip out back, "Welcome To Goon Island" feels like a handful of raw mince. There is no need to bang on about a producer, the sound is as rough and ready as it gets - grimy guitars, drums thumping through reverb and Rich Cash's rambling, semi-medicated monologues about this septic isle (i.e. "Goon Island") claw away at each other.

But raw meat can still be fashioned into something fancy, and fashion they can and they do, feverishly. Beneath the surface of this mucky sounding record lurks a swelling placenta of creativity, shooting nutritious directives at every song and making repetition a surprisingly atypical feature. "B54" is the Primal Scream that Primal Scream so desperately want to be - scuzzy, stylishly complacent and inherently visceral. "My Favourite Hat" is Franz Ferdinand beaten, thrashed and then beaten some more by The Cramps, with a Gameboy.

"Ba (Ba-Ba Ba)" with its funky speakeasy jazz horns has a suspicious air of class and the magnificently serious "Round" is Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On" dry-humped by Mark E Smith atop chunky industrial beats. It is foxy in the kind of way that's likely to get you committed. Ultimately, it's not that XX Teens throw everything including the kitchen sink at it, but rather that they drink everything under the sink and wait to see what happens. "Welcome To Good Island" is that kind of experience. You shouldn't forget that sometimes the most incoherent sounding have the most to say.

    by James Berry