While downloading my digital review copy via MediaFire, I was assailed by adverts for eBay and the upcoming tour by Mumford and Sons. I wouldn’t exactly call it irony, but if ever a label was less about the kind of turgid crap that Mumford and Sons represent, it’s Edinburgh’s Bearsuit Records.
Their latest compilation draws together 17 tracks by 17 artists that evoke the spirit of early Foetus, the clamouring clatter of Cabaret Voltaire circa ‘Nag Nag Nag’ and obscure underground acts like Murder the Disturbed.
The percussion-led industrial clatter of ‘Boogiewoogie Tokyo’ by Senji Niban gets things off to a suitably strange start, with dubby basslines and tinkling chords wafting around an insistent rhythm. It sets the tone, and then some. At times painfully warped and utterly crazed (‘Bhudda Jumps Over The Wall’ is a genuine headfuck, and the industrial jazztronica of Harld Nono’s ‘Tahiik’ is seriously far out, while the multi-faceted ‘Infants Gathering Storm Data’ by 0Point1 is truly something else), ‘Tomato Sauce Lasers’ is as inspired as it is strange and as surreal as the title suggests.
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Of course, you’d expect nothing less from Bearsuit, and if you’re on the market for something a bit different, then this is it.
Tomato Sauce Lasers, Sausage Lassos Online
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