Mclusky were always rooted more in bile than hormones, contempt and wit over quick-burn idealism. That stuff ages well. Their new mini-album i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley, the second release since their comeback, is their most direct and coherent since 2002’s cult-classic Do Dallas, distilling their berserk energy down to five frantic songs (and one slower track about elves) in under 14 minutes.
The sound has been preserved from the Do Dallas days, a guttural bass and a snap-tight rhythm on “i know computer” setting up lead singer Andrew Falkous to attack his guitar neck as though it’s done him some mischief. He assumes new voices (a hallmark of the two decades he’s spent fronting Future of the Left), scuttling from matter-of-fact to bloody-throated in a split-second. It recalls Nicolas Cage at his most unhinged, or Tom Hardy playing the recalcitrant lunatic title character in Bronson, uncanny and uncomfortable but funny almost all the time.
The one-liners are spare and jagged: “Give blood/Then take it back/Fair enough.” It’s one of dozens across bowling alley that, taken together, reveal a disdain for greedy bastards and a fear of a society teetering on the edge of oblivion. There’s a “terror of completing capitalism” and sharpened guillotines on “spock culture” (though they’re a “bit too French”); “hi! we’re on strike” has fun questioning the nature of time and authority; and even “that was my brain on elves” comes to the conclusion that “animals have feelings/But not in a way they can monetize.”
But to take this all too seriously is to miss the point. Falkous is an absurdist, like the Fall’s Mark E. Smith or anti-comedians such as Stewart Lee and Ted Chippington; Mclusky’s foundational principle is basically that rock music is way better when it’s not didactic or po-faced. The high-point of the album is “as a dad,” with its roadhouse-from-hell slide guitars and razor-hook chorus: “In the piranha was another piranha/And in the piranha was another piranha.” Squint hard enough and you could convince yourself that’s saying something about society and capitalism, about new fears lurking behind old ones, everyday viciousness compounded and repeated. Instead that line was written (or improvised) by bassist Damien Sayell’s infant son, Magnus, as he strummed a guitar one-handed. The track fades out with a moving reflection on fatherhood that would be easy to miss beneath Falkous’ posturing, and pretty much stands alone in the band’s catalog: “The long crawl to irrelevance/Feels a little better every time you smile.”
“as a dad” really works, though, because Mclusky have always had a knack for hooks—and, crucially, rhythms. Sayell and drummer Jack Egglestone sound monstrous here, the late Steve Albini still seemingly present a quarter-century after producing and engineering Do Dallas. And Falkous, for all that his bursts of mad atonality hit the ear first, knows precisely where to hammer in every syllable for the maximum impact. A track like “fan learning difficulties” could have turned into an incomprehensible rant if they’d leaned into its manic energies and played it fast and loose; instead it’s slowed down to a megaphone monologue and sped up to a sprint in concussive little bursts.
There have been moments in Mclusky’s catalog—and Falkous’s own with Future of the Left and as Christian Fitness—that have been more exploratory and experimental than the tracks on bowling alley. But rarely have the band sounded so locked in. Here they are weird and jagged and noisy, occasionally abstruse and often disarmingly melodic. It seems they’re only out to impress themselves, and that’s the sort of stuff that doesn’t burn up with time.
