PRODUCT RECALL - review added 31st August 2009
Album Review: Liquor In The Front, Poker Round The Back (2009)
For fans of: Alternative Metal... and brilliant album titles
Have to say Product Recall's sound seems to have nothing in common with the look of their album. From first appearances I was expecting Southern blues-tinged bar room rock 'n' roll with an overabundance of average musicianship and vocalizing.
The name of the album doesn't exactly help matters. Full marks for having by far the best album title of the year, but again it doesn't prepare you for the noise that rampages from the speakers like petrol soaked fireworks in a Semtex condom.
Product Recall's style is somewhere in that none-existent void between Slayer, The Sex Pistols and The Beach Boys. The music is bass heavy and as raw as a grazed knee. The vocals have a Neanderthal tone you could coat in fossilized amber and use to kill a triceratops. They are so rugged and simplistic it wouldn't surprise me if the singer stood on stage in a leopard-skin loincloth with a wooden club clenched in his hairy fist. The drums and guitars also take the none-technical route to music-making, being more about noise and aggression than technical nuances.
Still, it all works well. I'm not going to call this a brilliant album but there's something innately loveable about it. The songs aren't serious and the sound is perfect if you like nothing more than stomping around like a lunatic. Product Recall remind me of Lawnmower Deth, another punky and thrashy UK band that took the piss more than a professional urine sampler. The throaty 'death' vocals throughout the record also sound uncannily like 'Heavy Metal Farmer' - find the clip on YouTube - which gives the album an even more comedic bent.
Song wise, 'I've Got A Mental' sounds like 'Richard Hung Himself' (D.I. or Slayer's cover, take your pick). Best song award however goes to 'Twinkle Twinkle', a metal take on a selection of nursery rhymes. Disturbingly, it's the best track on the album.
Product Recall - Kane Dalton (drums), Keef Hodge (guitars), Andrew Larkin (vocals), Eliot Poulter (guitars) and Matt Payne (bass) - have produced an anomaly of an album with Liquor In The Front, Poker Round The Back. It's brilliant for being brilliantly terrible... something that makes it almost impossible to mark. I suspect half the people who hear it will think it's a pile of steaming cack. The other half will adore it with a passion normally reserved for hamsters and 3 legged gerbils.
Check out... 'Twinkle Twinkle'.
Track List:
1. Not Your Song
2. Brain Machine
3. Ode To Louis
4. Iffs And Butts
5. Jump
6. Smug You Are
7. Breeders
8. I've Got A Mental
9. Question My Judgements
10. Twinkle Twinkle
11. Be Myself
12. Dead Quiet
Label: Romulus X Records
Artist's website(s): Product Recall , MySpace
