Louder Than Death – Stop Und Fick Dich
The best thing about Louder Than Death’s pedal-to-the-metal debut 12” was that, despite Arish “King” Khan’s usual array of garage-punk charms being on display, you knew the best was definitely still to come as, since it was recorded, he’d recruited Looch Vibrato and Aggy Sonora from incendiary French noise-makers Magnetix for this forthcoming LP. With their arrival, so too that of Freddie Rococco from Khan’s Shrines, bit-parts from the legendary Ian Svenonius and the return of Sean Wood from The Spits, there simply isn’t room for the EP’s odd electro asides, the focus instead resolutely now being on two-minute trash anthems. And there’s a blistering 14 of them, each quick out of the traps and tight as hell over their abrupt climaxes.
Here for a good time not a long time, Stop Und Fick Dich ain’t big and it ain’t clever, but it is ants-in-your pants danceable dynamite. Purposefully bad taste too, the snotty title-track is a fine example of such orgiastic chaos, half Svenonius-level melodic nonsense, half crude surf-inflected punk. Punctuated throughout by these potty-mouthed smash-and-grabs that don’t even begin to take themselves seriously, there’s daft odes to dirty late-night chicken shops and tongue-in-cheek tales of leather-clad rentboys delivered with both a snarl and a smile.
Wood’s crunchy guitar parts borrow both from New Wave and early rock ‘n’ roll, Khan revelling in the frothy dynamic and turning in a number of camp spoken-words like those of Seth Bogart. These allow a strain of slower-tempo melancholy to muddy the backwaters, total ripper “Born In 77” immediately rectifying the situation with sweaty, psych-charged soloing, a gleefully recurrent motif frequently given the gruff, distorted makeover fans of Khan’s various projects expect and demand. Business as usual then, and business is booming for LTD.
Best track: “Born In 77”
~Stop Und Fick Dich is released 28th June 2019 via In The Red.~