When identical twins Charlie and Craig Reid first unleashed hell with their Firth of Forth squawks and "Letter from America" sailed dangerously close to the top of the charts, little did they know that twenty-odd years later, the music scene would be full to bursting point with Scots bands and their braw and brash, if not always entirely bonny, brogue. It would be beyond easy to slot Penguins Kill Polar Bears straight into the Dewey system of Scottish rock, on a shelf somewhere between the full-throttle self-loathing of The Twilight Sad and the distorted pop barrage of The Xcerts, and be done with it. But in actual fact, despite Ben Proudlock's burr suggesting the contrary - and much like the protagonists in The Proclaimers' breakout track - the land on the other side of the Atlantic plays just as important a role as PKPB's homeland does in the development of their sound.
And yet it could all have been very different had it been Penguins Kill Polar Bears' first EP, "Dawn", sitting on the treatment table. Unequivocal, unflinching and unerringly aggressive in sound, the debut, and in particular the polar hurricane of "Homebound" and the radiating desolation of "Sandcastles", froze more than one reviewer in their tracks but remained at least constant in its onslaught. But "Vessels & Veins" is a different beast. Opener "Lungs", in all its glacial beauty, displays a similar burning intensity to their earlier material but has taken on an inexorable quality, a bleakness that manifests itself in revilement ("This is Jesus as we know/he was just a whore") and guitar torture to rival even Jonny Greenwood's most depraved assaults.
The brooding anxiety of "Wish With Worry" can be traced back to the epic density of their Scottish cousins, Aereogramme (and to a lesser extent their reborn incarnation, The Unwinding Hours), and the full-throated bite of The Smashing Pumpkins, whilst "Something Old" bleeds with a sparkling, simmering agony that Texas' Mineral did so well in the mid nineties, before the nascent emo genre had been saddled with the baggage that accompanies it today. But for all the name-dropping, the EP retains an identity of its own, no more so than on the slow-burning and vertiginous closer, in which guitar aurorae and frost-chipped percussion form a swirling, shimmering maelstrom that gradually shears its way through speakers and eardrums alike, the dull explosion of silence that caps the track all the more arresting for the cleaving rage that precedes it.
Fortunately, despite the band's admission that their lyrics tend to be primarily negative in focus, it's not all bleak fury; "Wish With Worry", whilst hardly being happy-go-lucky, is in actual fact an anxious love song, an angsty hope whose warmth ("I am lost/I've been found/I am yours/Now you're mine") shines through like a weak hibernal sun.
Youthful and intense, that much we knew already after "Dawn". But for their second helping, Penguins Kill Polar Bears have ramped up the frosty ambience and set out to explore a less straightforward path, where raw and glittering rock combines with a penchant for a more progressive song structure. Filing them away might not be so simple after all. Not that you'd want to with EPs like this...
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