Squire of Gothos - We Do Scorpion Things

Squire of Gothos - We Do Scorpion Things (Rag And Bone)
Squire of Gothos are a formidable live proposition who've been making waves across Britian with incendiary live sets, and have been bigged up to me by everyone from Scrabble and Gatr to random munters bumming fags outside of Optimo. Truthfully, I missed them in the face-hugging confines of Max's Kansas City (apologies to Lono for not making that one), so 'Scorpion Things is actually the first I've heard from them. Ooooft - these guys make Deathklok look subtle.

Rave is undergoing a weird reevaluation at the moment; the likes of Burial and Distance flit into the shadows of neon pyres to half-inch mournful synth lines, whilst Optimo and Slabs of The Tabernacle like to ressurect the glory days from time to time, in all their full-on day-glo lunacy. Squire of Gothos obviously have no interest in either post-modern deconstructionism, or nostalgic reminisces - Rave is here, now and right up in your fucking bassbins. Right? Breakbeats, booming 808 kicks and screeching nippy synths are deployed with glorious abandon - if something's worth doing, it's worth doing harder than anyone else can handle. Big Yellow Smiley Faces, with it's wugga-wugga bassline, synthetic strings and fractured "kill everyone now" vocal, shouted at the top of it's voice, proves that Squire of Gothos are happy to act the fool - there's no pretention about hip or cool. It's just awesome.

In most instances, I'd hate the idiotic-ironic ticket, but like Dr McNinja or Axe Cop, Squire of Gothos work by the Ninja-pirate-robot-zombie priniciple - the more you multiply the awesome, the more awesome it actually becomes. Booming in at 135 bpm, opener Dark Thing blithely mixes both the modern and the classic; the hefty bass synth (filtering down to a sub) sounds a lot like the NI softsynth Massive, but the NEE NEE NEE melody and 303 cowbells are retro as fuck, and twice as beefy as anything a laptop can manage. It's a turn-your-brain-off slice of genius mentalism. After Hours Dog Racing and Flex Hype weigh in with a similar heft; all lfo-ed bass, chopped up vocal snippets and monster climaxes that make the lizard brain jump and squawk. Skitting between four four and dubstep syncopation, it invites every genre to join in the clusterfuck. More of the same, essentially, but if you were looking for surprises, then this is not the album for you. Without ever growing too repetitive, Squire Of Gothos manage to beat you round the head with the awesome stick for the next 60minutes (Cum wit Dat's "we're fucked" vocal being a favourite), before the writhing mess of bassline monsters finally gives birth to the glorious Til Da Morning. Four to the floor and wobbling like an early Skream production, its big, but when the vocal kicks in, in all it's harmonised cheesiness, it's hard not to love. This is the bastard-child of Candi Staton; the well-adjusted child of the drug-fuck generation leering about how it wants to "Dance until the morning comes" (slyly rhymed with "kickdrum") just like mommy and daddy did back in the fields of Suffolk.

Turn on, tune in, drop. Horrificaly dumb, but so worth the effort.