Courtesy of Stu Gibson of Sleazegrinder here are the sleeve notes to THE EXPERIMENT REQUIRES YOU TO CONTINUE

Stray Dog Café – A Séance In Bedlam

Ladies, gentlemen, lurgies and germs, legless and grimacing, enter ye the café, sink into a surreptitiously placed seat, enjoy the exhibition and virtual world of aural rib-tickling. This ain’t Rock’n’Roll, laggards n’ glass-eyeds, it ain’t café society either but like stray dogs these songs take many forms from mongrel mutations outta The Thing to blue-blooded pedigrees sniffling around any alleyway and crotch-path they wish and assembling a disarray of gut-crunching clanking and seismic skronk that’ll smoke the skin of the hardest chin.

A Date With Elvis that won’t be cramped by any one style as it descends, nay, plummets into an off-kilter abyss like a shambolic yet shuddering sci-fi cataclysm; a Blake’s 7 with an overdraft facility excavating Captain Beefheart riffs and reassembling them on a construction site of hacked-off knuckles and cartoon capers from Mister Men. No pathetic, socio-miserablist-aimlessly agitating display of affectedly disparate anger, there’s a freshness and sense of adventure among the probing bass-lines tickling the urethra-funk into quirks and flirting along fault-lines where Big Black’s Jordan Minnesota or Fists of Love have springtime frolics with the knock-need nervous alienation of Are Friends Electric, dragging them to the scorched-earth Swampland The Scientists conducted their noxious noise experiments in.

You could pick crumbs of organic bread from your Guardian, lazily remarking ’oh, so redolent of The Fall darling’, yet they reflect Fall this and more little gurl, from the floor to your bedroom wall, in being nothing at all alike apart from their spectacularly cantankerous sense of the absurd and splenetic spree of sermons. Obtuse, acute and eloquently disarticulated, sinewy sinister arpeggios get their word in edgeways over and around the igneous litany of discombobulated blues riffs aberrated through cement mixers of gristle throbbing spasmodically before being hung out to dry on serrated washing lines stretched tight by stumblebum drums, all masking a garbled genius behind the frenetic funhouse set free on a rollercoaster through verboten quarries.

Not vain enough to be classed as avant-garde yet definitely, defiantly artistic, like Bauhaus’ b-sides dribbling bile and bibulous beauty over Butthole Surfer’s beastly, greasiest parts, just with a self-effacing Replacements shrug as opposed to self-conscious weirdness, so honing a heroically haphazard set of edifying surrealist hillocks that shield them from their north-western (Wigan) mire and from which you can construct your own eddying route out of your slumber, whether achingly, archly cosmopolitan cliché or scuff-kneed, split-seamed scum-bucket slice of street-sewer swill.

So, slip inside the abode of saucer-eyed malcontent and dwell on the schizoid, schismatic, slapdash, scattershot semblance of reality in absentia of these inventive miscreant mantras. Noise disciples, stand and await delivery. The neu trashmen cometh. Hail n’ hark ye, and verily be heartened.

Stu Gibson
Sleazegrinder
10/03/08