Doom-punk?! That inspires less confidence that all other hyphenated music genres except all the ones that include the word “jazz”.
So it was with some trepidation when The Battery Farm start up/ pipe up. Luckily The Battery Farm’s new single isn’t some kind of horrendous metal + something else mess you find cluttering bandcamp with faux Celtic artwork.
If The Battery Farm are punk, they’re closer to Pere Ubu or some weirdy weird US shitsville punk that they’d call Proto-Punk on some fancy pants website like Pitchfork. Or, the stuttering, looping rhythm is like some mad, experimental glam. You could see Brian Eno wanting to get his hands on this, and doing a bad job of producing this lot. All these means that The Battery Farm are some Devo/ Pere Ubu breeding programme gone wrong.
So that’s the music sorted. The vocals are diatribe, punk but in a declamatory way, either John Cooper Clarke or some US Dead Kennedy’s type biz. It’s very reminiscent of Dead Sea Apes’ recent collab with Adam Stone, Warheads, which fused British dystopia with old style punk riffs. So if you liked that, you’ll like this, and vice-y versa.
The words are mysterious, open ended and more short story-esque. This is a writer more concerned in transmitting ideas than song structure and this is what makes The Battery Farm an interesting proposition. It’s more told than sung and more cryptic than flag waving.
Plus the album art reminds me of Calamity James from The Beano having a strangle wank.
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