Album Review: Menace Beach – Super Transporterreum EP
It gives me considerable pleasure to introduce a great Leeds band. There aren’t that many right now, you know. Hookworms go without saying… um… Hope and Social are still around but have been going for ages, of course… anyway, answers on a postcard, please. But here we have Menace Beach. Their debut LP dropped early this year but there’s no stopping this cheeky quintet: they have a further EP to treat us with, from which ‘Super Transporterreum’ is taken.
It has been said that Menace Beach come across as a reboot of the grungier bits of Britpop, but that’s only half the story. If that. Yes, on ‘Ratworld’ there’s the occasional angularly aloof guitar riff, but mostly it’s chugging, overdriven Telecasters, phased group vocals and such a surfeit of punky, feedbacked attitude that would make even the most rebellious Goldsmiths student blush. To be honest, there’s not much Brit about it at all, taking as they do the majority of their inspiration from ‘90s American melodic punk. The revival continues apace.
‘Super Transporterreum’ takes the sounds of ‘Ratworld’ and distills them into a three-minute shot of multi-layered harmonic power-noise. The decision to employ a half-speed bonus pre-chorus does them no disservice at all. It’s as if Nevermind’s the prosthetic production values of ‘Nevermind’ agreed to mate with the disgusted nihilism of ‘In Utero’… as we all wished had happened first time around. And if that may be saddling a modest band from Leeds with the weight of grunge’s hopes and dreams… well, someone has to, and who better than a group of people of whom nobody would predict incredible things? I daresay Cobain would have wanted it that way.
The ‘Ratworld’ album from Menace Beach is out now. The ‘Super Transporterreum’ EP will be released in the UK on the 25th of September on Memphis Industries; the American release follows on the 2nd of October. Stream the title track of the EP in the Soundcloud widget below.
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