My friend Phil and I have a joke that always gets delivered when coming out of a record store:

“What’d you buy?”
“Oh (insert names of really good, weird, interesting contemporary records)…
….never gonna listen to them”

It’s true. So much music exists purely as a fetish item, an object divorced from it’s purpose – to be listened to. It’s why people buy unplayable lathe cut 9.5 inch records or CDs encased in packaging that has to be broken to be played. Playing it is not the point, owning it is.

I don’t want to be presumptious to the people who buy their records, but I reckon the Get Hustle are a good example of this. In fact, Phil himself said he hadn’t listened to their debut album Earth Odyssey in a while now. But get this, they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t exist in that chasm of bands who sell more belt buckles than records.
Earth Odyssey is a cracking record, I wore it out listening to it when I got it. But this new stuff is something else. The warning sign was shot like a flare with the Who Do You Love? 7″ a while back, that reduced Bo Diddley’s sexual brag to a series of terrifying throbs and grunts that genuinely seem from another planet.
Rollin’ In The Ruins takes that and just makes it even stranger but yet somehow more euphoric. It’s more showy, more entertaining, still as minimal in the instrumentation but yet massive in sound. They always had this thing for a crescendo and a crash and an extravagant gesture but now it’s like a hyped up circus Barnum-gone-wrong witchdoctor hocus pocus overwhelming BLOB of sound.
WSTP especially is giant, I would kill to see them do it live (c’mon folks, UK tour?) and in Valentine they have a genuinely unsettling, commanding frontwoman. I don’t know who to compare it to: Ike & Tina Turner? Sun Ra? Birthday Party?
I don’t know. I’m not going to tell you to buy it as I reckon loads of you already have, I’m going to tell you to break the seal and listen to the damn thing.

Posted: 05|15|06 at 4:10 pm. Filed under: record reviews.
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