THE SPARTAN DREGGS
Forensic R&B
Damaged Goods
This is NOT a Billy Childish album whatever it says on the
cover and it’s all the better for it.
His lordship has created a backdrop for the bottled
lightning that is Neil Palmer, late of The Vermin Poets and Fire Dept.
Guide vocals are left up in the mix and guitars remain
resolutely detuned, the better to showcase Palmer’s caterwauling vocal style
and autistic guitar.
Childish plays bass like he paints and Wolf Howard drums
with such freshness and fire that you could be forgiven for thinking that he
had only heard the songs minutes before playing them.
The songs are astonishing, Palmer and Childish weave tales as
diverse as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, The Hoo Peninsular, Aeolian Processes
and Operation Dead Stick through amplifiers and guitars approaching their half
century.
In forensically examining the spirit of rock ’n' roll they
appear to have invented a new genre.
It’s prog, it's punk, it's pop, and it’s The Spartan Dreggs.
Richard Huggins
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