The Beat Surrender

I’m not a fence sitter if I can help it, so David Cronenberg’s Wife really are perfect for me to review, because love them or hate them the chances are that within three minutes of them taking your ear for a spin around their dark yet humour filled music, you’ll have an opinion of them fully formed one way or the other.

For the record I think theyare a great band, a relationship with them that started with last years album Bluebeard’s Room and continues with the equally compelling, enjoyable and at times disconcerting follow up Hypnagogues.

Once again it’s richly laced with tongue in cheek moments and situations, yet also straddles the line and crosses into moods such as desperation and paranoia as well on tracks like the excellent Fight Song, You Should Have Closed The Curtain and Can’t Keep Doing What You Do.

If you’re looking fror influences you would again have to delve into their sound and be prepared to sidestep the obvious musical mines they plant in the album (a track like In The Limo has an Irish feel to it but nothing else on here does), 50’s rock n’ roll, 60’s surf and a whole host of lo-fi groups from the 1980’s is probably a fair way of summing them up, but even then i’ve probably missed a raft of others that I could mention.

As for a quick soundbite to describe them….try ‘an altermative to the alternative, but not the mainstream’....I think the group would like that discription in a perverse kind of way.