Back in January I reviewed the band’s single ‘Crude Oil Water’ and loved it, so news of another release was something to smile about in these hard times.
But you probably need to be warned that the song isn’t something that will make you smile, unless like me you relish something that’s a little disturbing and bloody fucking dark. But the enjoyment you get from music like this isn’t that happy enjoyment, it’s the enjoyment of something nihilistic. Something that you can let take you into a wild dark place.
Like ‘Crude Oil Water’ this song has something, more than something, of a post-punk sound, and to be honest a Goth kind of sound in the guitar. Although this is mixed with something punky and raw. The sound is dense people. The vocals are raw. And when it speeds up at the end, the rush, the thrill is something else.
What this song is about is, at the precise moment of writing this review, something of a mystery, although this isn’t lessening my enjoyment of the song. I like a song that mystifies me, that I’ll have to listen to again and again until I start to start to get inklings of what it’s about.
The video, by the way, isn’t going to help you work it out. It’s dark, fucking dark and disturbing. It has that DIY vibe of the music videos of the music I liked in my youth. It’s fucking cool people.
The Battery Farm are one of those bands that the more I hear the more I love. They’re a band doing their own thing, with not even a nod to what’s fashionable, they basically say ‘fuck you if you don’t like what we do, we do, we don’t care if you don’t’. This release is a joy, a dark disturbing joy. It’s music for our times.
