With possibly the best band name ever, Mum & Dad exist on the fringes for those who find Add N To (X) just a bit too tuneful.
Ian Rainford and Joe Robinson combine wired up motherboards that last lit up around 1972 with the oddly affecting, occasionally really quite terrifying, voice of Claire Pearson (who was once widely rumoured to be in possession of a robotic arm). As Mum & Dad, they are to the Twisted Nerve family what salad is to gravy. With teeth rattling electronics and sounds mixed up past disturbing.
The 'parents' set up their stall somewhere between The White Noise and Black Sabbath, with filmic inspirations evocative of Barbarella riding pillion with the cast of Psychomania into the dementia of Mogan: A suitable Case For Treatment.
When it works, it's with the Wigan wiggin' of 'Dawn Rider' - a co-write with the very great ex-World Of Twist, now Earl Brutus sultan of loop-pop Gordon King - or the fantastically demonic 'Kiss Of Death' - the sort of big bugger-off monster you'd want to hear in your head whilst strolling around your workplace with a shotgun.
And you can never go wrong with a title like 'Donington' - wherein the home of the Monsters Of Rock is transformed into a seething orgiastic pit of lazers and dragons, with a 50ft Clair a-screeching away, astride the madness, and children have never sounded as sinister as they do on the Portishead-actually-in-hell of Marvin. Brrr.
Deep down, dirty and, quite frankly, demented, it can be a bit of an endurance at times - 'Pretty Pretty', in particular, is quite annoying - but if you want a nice slab of harrowing maverick moogin' action proving once and for all that your parents really do fuck you up, then this is for you.
