Let's get to the point: this album is a stormer. Building on the noisy, guitar-dominated style of their debut album, 'Half Nelson,' 'Every Six Seconds' doesn’t sound like a small band from the north of England thrashing away in a provincial studio, but – in the best possible sense – a US band really giving it everything.
The sound is dense and guitar driven, and ther's a distinct emphasis on a thrashy, boozy and bastardised take on rockabilly blues with a punk / metal edge. By which I mean it’s rockabilly blues with a punk / metal edge in the way Ministry’s ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’ is rockabilly blues with a punk / metal edge, and is in some ways reminiscent of the swaggering brawling country stylings of The Morning Glories. It has a swing. It has swagger – a huge, big-bollocked swagger. From the opener, ‘Simian Kind’ through the belting single ‘Head of Safety’ and the sleazy ‘On Me Not In Me,’ and ‘Best Sex in Texas’ it's a relentless and confidently-delivered wall of noise, and it’s more or less relentless for the fist five tracks, until the midway point: ‘Low Sperm Count,’ a lyric from which the album draws its title is a magnificent example of a slow-building quiet verse / loud chorus post-grunge number, and it’s blinding, with a truly gargantuan chorus, and building to a monster crescendo at the end. The pace resumes thereafter and there’s not a duff – or cheesy acoustic, ballady – track in sight, with the occasional quieter, slower numbers, like ‘Bob ‘n’ Laura’ being unsettling and dark.
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A cracking album from a criminally underrated band.
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