Cut O'Clock by Nasty Nine: Waschbärsalz

I like 9 o'clock Nasty as friends and that will colour this review. I believe in transparency. I have one friend in prison I can visit once a month and the three nasties that visit me. Never together. That is curious and I only realised it as I wrote it. I spend hours on the internet, they bring me stories from the other world. I met them when I was young and as straight as a rapier. They showed me Leicester, drank with me in the Fan Club, took me onto buses and into late night bars where you had to pull a spoon on a string to be admitted. I became half-German boy, half Leicester pirate. Pete brings me rum. I am not allowed rum but he brings it. He brings it and he drinks it. Sydd brings me the sausages I love so much from a small shop in Loughborough. They come in greaseproof paper and smell of dead woodland and the agony of pork. Ted brings me newspapers and cheese. He knows I hate cheese, it amuses him. A cruelty in kindness because the newspapers keep me busy. I type-set my novel entirely with cut-outs from the British Press. I am on page 403. The Daily Mail headline writers create two levels of fiction in one. The lies they weave and the stories I tell.

Soon I will be allowed two days out a week. I plan to go to gigs again. To sip water and stand at the back and dream. Watch one band and remember another. Write a review about both the music in the now and the music in the then.

Cut? It is their best record yet. That in itself is a recommendation. Even if they were shit, at least they would be less shit with every release. Rick Astley cannot say that. The Style Council neither. Coldplay never.

But they weren't shit. They started fragmented and lunged in a different direction with every song, and gradually they found the discipline to focus within a song on a single idea and deliver on it correctly. Now they have put together three songs that sound like a whole. It genuinely is a record with three parts, all different but with a spine that connects them together.

Dead Planet is instantly memorable with a guitar hook and a darker lyric than I expected. The knowing, edge to the lyrics, the commentary of self-destruction is chilling. Gravy Train ls lighter and angrier, with a throwaway psychobilly snare and a screeching soundtrack. I remember this song of old and it has grown to be meaner and stronger than I thought possible. THX1138 begins as a hard rocker, turns into an interesting, groovy rap-rock-hop pop song and then unleashes a devastating-attack-chorus.

Recently I have commended bands for an approach where everything is in its place. Everything is just right. I cannot say that about this record. There are things all over the place. This is a band that still needs to sharpen down to a needle point, and as they grind down their sound by force of personality, It will arrive. but there is so much in so many places it delivers.

We have an expression in my native tongue, "Waschbärsalz" which literally translates to Racoon Salt.

We use it when something makes our whole face contract and tense to a point in space and time. It is intended to convey a sense of being overpowered with something, usually funny or pleasurable or sexual or all three. This record is "Waschbärsalz."

There you go Ted, stick that in your fucking press release, and enjoy the cheese.