PHWOAR – Pleasure Island
Time wounds all heels, as Mr Marx (no, the other fellow with the strange facial hair) once remarked, and poor, little Great Britain, once the greatest Empire in human history, is finding out that karma is not just a thing one of them gurus back in the colonies came up with to sell more tickets to lectures. And, while morale has never been particularly high on old Limey, things are getting desperate.
Some are holding back the tears while dunking their biscuits into their afternoon tea. But, thankfully, like their cousins over the pond, many Brits are prone to histrionic displays of truth-telling. PHWOAR’s funny and virulent brand of protest songs would’ve got them tarred and feathered just a few decades ago. And, while risks still exist, the duo is willing to take them in defence of the facts.
PHWOAR’s “Pleasure Island” is a “God Save the Queen” for the Meme Age, a catchy punk song about Britain in a world where the Queen is no more and her offspring just got thrown out of the palace for, essentially, fondling kids. Down at street level, PHWOAR, assure us that things are much worse. It would all be enough to make a grown man cry if it weren’t for the excellent flow of the verse parts and that irresistible, angry tone with which the singing delivers every line.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but as many Brits have long since discovered, there’s always Greece and Spain to rely on!
Young and Doomed – Obituaries
Demos and live recordings of a pre-devil-lock, horror-inspired version of The Misfits have appeared online to much interest from fans and casual observers. And while those snippets of an iconic band’s infancy are charming in their own way, all I can say is that it’s a good thing that we’re so far ahead in the game. Stuff like this would’ve just killed them had it been delivered earlier.
The truth is that we don’t expect too much from the good guys in pop-rock. But we certainly have really high standards that we must keep for the villains. We want them, bands like Young and Doomed, to have great levels of energy, to be dastardly, and to maintain their reputation as the kinds of people that you would only want to meet at a live concert and certainly not down a dark alley.
Young and Doomed take great inspiration from horror-punk of old and deliver their convincing version with “Obituaries.” Where the group really shines is by hiding its intentions, by never allowing the audience to see whether they’re grinning the whole time, whether they’re just doing it for a laugh. The song, essentially, is a threat to shoot someone in the head and leave them for dead; it is not just catchy, but mean-sounding and determined.
