Putting the darken into Brighton, 80s MB-LD are the malformed, mutton-headed court jesters prancing aroound the margins of the Brit scene, but there’s a growing number of us around here who rate this bunch of rocky horror riff-raff very highly indeed. 2002’s Horse Of The Dog was a short, sawn off, nasty little record that exposed most of the band’s peers for the one-trick comedians they are.
Fronted by Guy McKnight, a punk-runt Morrisonian figure who – praise the lord – seems to favour getting up his audience’s noses over petitioning their sympathies, these miscreants eschew CBGB fashionista revisionism in favour of a heart-warming morbidity. Their MO is to act as schlock pathologists, combing rock ‘n’ roll’s body-bank for the bits Roky, the Cramps, The Dead Kennedys, Beefheart, The Gun Club and The Misfits missed. The last three singles ‘Rise Of The Eagles’, ‘I Could Be An Angle’ and ‘Mister Mental’ are as good a place as any to get your bearings: manic, caffeine jittery and chronically disassociative.
Produced by QOTSA and Masters Of Reality man Chris Goss, The Royal Society is even heavier and more scatological than the debut. In other words, if this artefact were composed of paint rather than sound, it’d be an acid-dipped Joe Coleman print. Yes, there are elements of psychedelia, but The Disaster seem far more interested in comedown psychosis than the trip itself. Case in point: ‘Puppy Dog Snails’, an old worlde plague fable with idjit savant vocal from McKnight and Sergio Leone guitar. Or ‘The Dancing Girls’, wherein The Pixies mate with Lux substituting for Tim Curry in the sweet transvestite cabaret. Or ‘Drunk On The Blood’, a waltz of the cadavers with muted trumpet and Sonic Youth coda. And c’mon, how can you refuse a song entitled ‘Freud’s Black Muck’?
The Royal Society will play best at high volume in a darkened room during mushroom season with a Coffin Joe retrospective dripping from the glass teat. Suck it up.