I don't know about the members of Clockcleaner. I mean, I like the low, sinister squall of the band's noisy punk as well as their arch delivery. But the band is all but banned from playing their hometown Philadelphia for reportedly attacking minorities verbally, the handicapped physically, and other bands' equipment...urinarilly. In lieu of a signature hit, their MySpace page auto-loads a phone message from an angry, threatening fan, who insists that singer John Sharkey is "felonious." They've done their best to sully the icon of Kurt Cobain by calling their last record Nevermind and summarily talking tons of shit on Nirvana in subsequent interviews. And the lyrics of Babylon Rules, when intelligible, do their very best to debase and offend. I think these three might be...jerks.
But then that's the whole point. Likeminded selective sludge-plumbers like Pissed Jeans have already plowed through this niche, using it for a platform to sing on everything form sexual desperation to ice cream. While the territory of these bands is well covered (but still necessary), Clockcleaner are still trying to push a few buttons while they're at it. Babylon Rules has a bass-heavy lurch akin to the Jesus Lizard and Flipper, but played by hardcore geeks (as in the genre) who understand where those bands were coming from, and with a similar sense of space and terror. Still, they're not just emulating the sound of these bands-- there's a genuine desire to make listeners uncomfortable here.
On opener "New in Town", the guitar line is oddly syncopated like a hurried message in Morse code, and the rhythm section slithers while singer/guitarist John Sharkey lets out sometimes campy and often desperate squeals and grunts, giving it all a woozy, carnival-gone-wrong feel. "The birds and the bees won't save you now," Sharkey intones while the guitar mimics seagull divebombs, before his lyric switches perspectives ("I have a reputation to protect! Don't come inside me, I'm new in town!"). Even when crawling through a dirge__,__ they don't lose their swing-- the arch anti-solo squiggles of guitar make ample use of blues-scale heroics, piercing noise, echo and open space, while the rhythm section always finds an honest-to-god groove, sluggish and oppressive as it may be on "New in Town", "When My Ship Comes In", and more.
There's more of that uncomfortable rhythm on the stilted and sleazy two-note stomp of "Caliente Queen", and some nagging piano à la early Stooges in "Vomiting Mirrors" in between its brutal stops and starts. Babylon Rules sticks to the punk-album formula in the best ways, with an all-out thrasher as the penultimate track ("Daddy Issues") and by being powerfully, thankfully concise at eight tracks. The record might even be a bit tame compared to the band's reputation, but points to them for at least trying to provoke, for being a reminder of the responses this kind of music used to elicit-- the near-fearful reaction of audiences who must've felt like they were presented with some kind of dare.
