Blabbermouth consists of Lu Edmonds(guitar, sax, cümbüs, backing vox) and Mark Roberts (drums, synths) and between them they’ve got some pedigree, with Edmonds’ credits including The Daned (although everyone who plays an instrument’s been in The Damned at some point), The Waterboys, and PiL, and Roberts’ including The Godfathers, Massive Attack, and D-Ream. Well, we’ve all got something on our CV we’re not entirely proud of.
The pitch is that this is an album of ambient, industrial, pop, world, folk, free improv soundscape and post-punk which explores ‘the underbelly of modern life, alternative histories and the allegedy imminent takeover of the world by robots & AI’ using ‘semi-random texts culled from the Interweb’.
We’re in full-on postmodern intertextual mash-up territory here: opener ‘Deep State’ begins with what I assume to be a sampled segment of speech over a mangled electronic pulse before things very quickly take a turn for the strange, with expansive proggy / space rock guitars and samples all over the shop forging a Burroughsian collage work that alludes more to the experimentalism of early Cabaret Voltaire and Meat Beat Manifesto than anything more contemporary.
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They do kick out some mean grooves, and there’s a twist to every track: on ‘Karbap-Karbap’, a slow-burning desert rock stroller is driven into darkly oddball territory with an almost subsonic growling vocal, while ‘Maschine-Fragment’ comes on like a cross between The Fall and Honolulu Mountain Daffodils. Which is to say it’s absolutely bloody fantastic as it locks into a motoric groove.
With a slew of guest performers and voice robots covering the majority of vocal duties, ‘HöRSPIEL; chops together a vast array of familiar tropes to conjure something that’s genuinely innovative.
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