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Review: 'Flat Worms'
'Live In Los Angeles'   

-  Label: 'Frontier Records/Bandcamp'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '12.5.22.'

Our Rating:
Before being sent this Live album I'd never heard The Flatworms, so for me this is like the old pre-internet days when friends would send me live tapes of the latest cool bands, so I heard say Big Black and The Flaming Lips long before they had any records out in the UK. If this had arrived on a bootleg tape I'd have wanted to go see them the first opportunity I got. Sadly however I've already missed that chance as the bands UK tour has just finished. They have of course already put out two albums and a bunch of singles.

This low-fi document opens with Pearl a clattering introduction to the bands sound with guitars strafing the audience and snotty sounding vocals as lyrically they tip their caps towards New Rose era The Damned, although musically this is far more cacophonous than that.

Motorbike has a feedbacking Intro like they are revving a badly tuned Norton bike that starts to rattle as they get going on this full on speeding down the highway biker anthem.

Into The Iris is a good chugging rocker with crazed wailing guitar eruptions and pummel to the wall drumming that has echoes of early 90's Dinosaur Jnr as this freaks and peaks.

Plaster Casts is what you might be wearing after emerging from the steaming pit this song may well cause as it fires off in all directions at once clattering drums with wild guitars and the bass just trying to stick it all together.

Condo Colony is deep fried grunge nastiness like you've caused havoc at someone's keg party in a condo in the right part of town. They hit every effect pedal they can on the guitar solo and it wails away almost obliterating the vocals that you can just about make out.

Scattered Palms is a post Tornado tune with spaceship thrusting engine guitars, a pulsating beat and it's time to spark up and get fried with them. As the vocals start to spew numbers at us including 11816 that's the tile of the next tune, they freak out all over the speakers and minds meld.

11816 sounds like they have just snorted a couple of grams of speed and can't stop getting faster and louder as they repeat the lyrics from the end part of Scattered Palms like they are two songs that meld as one and they are in some sort of drugged up confusion and I'm sure most of the audience were well dazed by this point.

The album or set closes with Red Hot Sand that has a dark bass rumble that the drums race over and the guitar just flies off of that rumble and flays the audience into submission.

Find Out more at https://frontierrecords-flat-worms.bandcamp.com/


  author: simonovitch

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