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Tuesday 11 October 2011

Record Review – The Spartan Dreggs


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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