Life (...it eats you up) - Mika Vainio

If  we must have guitars in modern music (and people do persist in using them, don’t they?) let them sound like this – like a grinding tool – like...total overload...not like guitars normally sound...unless they sound like this in Doom Metal, which I’m guessing they might do, although genres such as Black/Doom/Death/Hell Metal might feature singers, and as you know, I only like singers from 1983 back. I saw someone in a Black Sabbath t-shirt yesterday. I wanted to stop him and say ‘That’s not big, or clever, or even ironic, twat’. But what can you do? By the album title you might guess this isn’t a jolly affair, or even a normally up and downbeat affair, although it does consist of various textures and therefore is not wall-to-wall (of) noise. Not quite. I’m listening to it for the first time and the builders on both sides of The Bunker are joining in now and then, on drills – it adds to the experience, as if they’re ‘jamming’ with Mika. They can’t compete, though. I wonder if they can hear through the open door, and think ‘He’s making a racket, we’ll show him’. There’s a cover of The Stooge’s ‘Open Up And Bleed’ here, which is like a screwed take, vocals slowed down to a monstrous growl – Iggy would approve, surely. I may not play this too often, but listening now, it feels like the best possible response to lightweight Pop, talent shows, Lady Gaga, silence, tabloid newspapers, TV ad songs, people who buy tabloids, the Olympics, the ‘arts’ coverage on BBC London News, the guy wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt, celebrity wreath-layers, adults who buy Harry Potter books, and anything/one else that pisses me off. It’s that powerful.