Back Once Again With the Ill Behaviour Dnb

ILL – We ARE Sick (Box Records, May 2018)
Review by Kris Smith

The net reminds me that I starting time saw Sick alive in Manchester in 2013. Their apparent frontwoman (Rosanne, since departed merely credited here as writer) played a series of objects into the mic throughout the gig, including a handsaw and some kind of electronic gizmo that issued forth evil waves of industrial noise. In the groundwork were vocals, drums, bass, guitar and songs including their just-released Pussy Riot-supporting single 'Kremlin', but it was articulate that ART was centre phase – which is unsurprising when yous learn that the band was one of several musical offshoots from Manc queercore artists collectiveWomb.

Seeing ILL once again at their London anthology launch this week was to see a band making an equally huge, enticing, genre-defying dissonance and having 18-carat fun doing and then. They write songs which are both featherbrained and serious, and they assail them (as well as each other) playfully. You tin can make a case for pretension in art, but there's none with Sick; like so many of the best bands they seem like a gang you'd honey to bring together, but ILL become one better and make you feel like you'd be welcome: friendly if not quite family unit-friendly (unless the family in question is more Addams than Partridge, perhaps). Songs are introduced self-deprecatingly by Harri, anchored on Whitney'due south gnarly bass, driven by Fiona's death-disco drums, embellished with Tamsin's guitar and shredded by Sadie (who inherited the aforementioned sonic screwdriver, and plays more guitar) while information technology seems like anybody sings; Harri's keyboards add together a carnival-from-hell/B-moving picture soundtrack vibe to the cute anarchy.

Sick have cited influences from punk rock through Britpop, only at that place's all sorts of mail/avant/prog ingredients in their unique musical mash, too. You can hear some of that early-Slits defiance of trad song structure, but to me the band's wall of sound evokes no-i and then much as hardcore pioneers Flipper, aslope some slightly-more than-overt Fall references, with peradventure Lou and Alice from Chumbawamba's vocals on elevation [check Manchester-to-Leeds distance – Ed.] No doubt such touchstones could be way off the marking – they ofttimes are – only they serve to stress that there is More THAN 1 Matter GOING ON here, not to say something for everyone. As with the alive set, and so too with the anthology.

'Ill SONG' is the introduction: a (mental) health crisis in musical form: "Y'all're putting stress/On the NHS/Sort yourself out, mate!" (Did I mention that this band is sardonically but unmistakably political?) 'Space DICK' is next, the anthem you didn't know y'all needed nigh objectification in nada gravity: "I'thousand here for the science, check out my appliance!" (Did I mention that this ring is *funny*? Bank check out the vocal'south brilliant DIY youtube vid.) The album returns to terra firma/firmer terror with the trip the light fantastic-y, indicatively-entitled 'STUCK ON A LOOP' and the superlative, intense-yet-melodic groove of 'BEARS'. I'll exist honest here, I've missed exactly who or what the latter song is about, but its intriguing chorus of "I'll feed you to my bears!" is the album in a nutshell: a perfect storm of enigma, whimsy and controlled violence. And oh! The sound effects you'll hear!

'BUS SHELTER' is a mural of the lost souls you tin can see in any city centre at night and a powerful portrait of homeless youth, interpolated with a litany of the impoverished northern towns whence they came. They chorus "where are you going to?" every bit the buses depart: it'south the album'southward most moving moment. 'I AM THE MEAT' swerves the album back into left-field, keeping matters unsettled, before 9 minute ballsy 'SLITHERING LIZARDS' crawls into view: "I'm so busy/My life is not pretty/I wake in my dreams/Equally my teeth are all crumbling down"; if this song isn't an allegory of Brexit United kingdom, its carcass picked clean by Tory thrift, I'll consume my deluxe-edition Stooges albums. Information technology climaxes with a dirge of "Shut them down/Lock them out/Give them guns/Kill their sons!" a Lou Reed-esque verse that also recalls the ambiguously-targeted vitriol of early on Clash lyrics, an influence evidenced by Whitney's stencilled bass guitar.

'POWER' follows, another unsettling, witchily-hypnotic groove, the band demonstrating past at present a solid gift for channelling pure noise that makes me want to segue this record into something/everything by Law-breaking or Pere Ubu or Faust. Later on 40 minutes of pummeling, righteous vitality, the anthology peaks with the furious 'HYSTERIA', an near Crass-way rant linking patriarchal history to the contemporary reality that church and state still seek command of women'south bodies, globally, from the US to Russian federation to Eire to Communist china.

ILL are an all-female person group, a fact that's both irrelevant and inescapable given the fiercely feminist politics of this textile. You lot could connect the band via swain Womb member Debbie Sharp (also of earlier riot grrrl bandValerie) to a barely-sketched history of the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland undercover, or trace their defiantly-uncommercial style through an alternate postpunk canon:LiLiPUT, Androids of Mu, Hagar the Womb, Witchknot, Gertrude,Slum Of Legs. Ill sound too focused to intendance about anything of the sort, merely in my view? Every bit special as information technology can undoubtedly experience to be in on a secret, perhaps the fourth dimension has come up for this music to go overground. It's time to get Sick.

In 1968, German activists SPK pathologised alienated lodge as the source and essence of poor health; they vowed to "plough disease into a weapon!" L years on, with this album, ILL have washed merely that.

'WE ARE ILL' is out now on Box Records.

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Source: https://loudwomen.org/2018/05/14/back-once-again-with-the-ill-behaviour/