Album Review: Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee, Los Angeles

What do you get when two drummers and a super-producer get together? It sounds like a musician joke, but the reality is that two post-punk tub-thumpers, Lol Tolhurst from The Cure and Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees (most recently seen drumming with John Grant), have teamed up with Dublin knob-twiddler extraordinaire, Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, for an album that also sees them roping in a host of famous pals to guest.

It’s synth-driven in the main, although there are enough guitars to keep indie-kids happy, courtesy of Lee, as well as his illustrious pals, The Edge and Idles’ Mark Bowen. Edge adds some subtle acoustic six-string magic to ‘Train With No Station’, with Lee subsequently distorting the sound almost beyond recognition.

The Idles’ string-smith, meanwhile, contributes some suitably serrated guitar to the dystopian dancefloor of ‘Uh Oh’, alongside vocals from Starcrawler singer Arrow de Wilde, who deliciously deadpans about how she’s “Doris Day… Elvis Presley… the fucking American Dream”.

Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie sings on three tracks, the blissed-out opener ‘This Is What It Is (To Be Free)’; the dub odyssey of ‘Ghosted At Home’; and the seductive shuffle of ‘Country Of The Blind’.

James Murphy, the LCD Soundsystem mainman, delivers a searing vocal on the tense title track, a cracking combination of agitation and danceability that’s a close relative of Battles’ mighty ‘Atlas’. On the closing ‘Skins’, a percussion-heavy affair that mixes tribal drumming with Murphy’s falsetto, before petering out in a wash of ambient synths, Murphy repeats the mantra, “We’ve got a ways to go”.

Overall, this is an impressive indie-electro extravaganza that could almost be a companion piece to Screamadelica or Sound Of Silver. Recommended.

8/10