Pleased to meat you

Want to know which kind of amps Lafaro used in the recording of their electrical storm of a new album, Easy Meat? What the producer was like? What crazy scrapes the boys got up to in the studio? Well tough. Would you prefer, instead, to have prior warning of the bubonic entrails of the record – how it smells rather than how it sounds? We asked Jonny Black & Co. to provide a roadmap through the record’s 18 tracks. Which they did – and while it’s the perfect guide to Easy Meat’s dark walls and corners, I wouldn’t trust it for planning a way out.

‘Full Tilt’:

A slight curlicue of deft percussion making way for a soft fluffy musical soufflé. Nuance abounds. Most revisions don’t improve the system; they only serve to draw it further from its initial state of beauty and undress. Without warning it turns complicated, unfair and cluttered with gobbledygook intended to confuse.
I didn’t order coffee. I don’t even like coffee. I don’t remember lighting this cigarette, and I don’t remember if I’m here alone or waiting for someone.

‘Langer’:

A New Jersey teen moves to California, gets a wee bit bullied and then learns karate from a handyman.

‘Sucking Diesel’:

Is this it? That’s what it’s all about man? Eating, drinking, fucking, sucking? Snorting? Then what? You’re 50. You got a bag for a belly. You got tits; you need a bra. They got hair on them. You got a liver; they got spots on it, and you’re eating this fucking shit, looking like these rich fucking mummies in here…

‘Wingers and Chips’:

‘Wingers And Chips’ is the theme tune to our new television pilot (currently awaiting the green light) of the same name about two co-dependant 16 year-olds who are forced to deal with separation anxiety after their plan to stage a booze-soaked party goes awry.

‘Scully’:

Give me scotch. I’m starving.

‘Boke’:

… but the worst thing I ever done – I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theatre, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, I made a noise like this: Hua-hua-hua-huuaaaaa – and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then – this was horrible – all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other.
I never felt so bad in my entire life.

‘Yes!’:

This particular little ditty is primarily about a former drug lord who returns from prison to wipe out all his competition and distribute the ill-gotten profits of his operations to the local poor and lower classes.

‘Have A Word With Yourself’:

“We at the Alliance Party are working hard to build a shared society, without division, free from sectarianism and prejudice and in which everyone – regardless of religion, gender, class, disability, colour, age, sexuality or nationality – are treated with respect and enabled to fill their full potential, free from fear.”

‘Easy Meat’:

And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than seven years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Belfast and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

‘Easy Peasy Meat’:

I made a big decision a little while ago/
I don’t remember what it was, which probably goes to show/
That many times a simple choice can prove to be essential/
Even though it might appear inconsequential.

‘Settle Petal’:

But this is no holy vision for these are headlights and they are moving. Fast.
Sensing that this baby wants to play, I power into a particularly snicketty section of sinew at 110%. With an instinctive twitch on the right hoof snap shut on the loud pedal and feel the taut tail of the Kia step wide. I simply catch it with a dab of oppo’ and I’m away…

‘Pat-a-Cake’:

In a dystopic and crime-ridden city, a terminally-wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg with submerged memories haunting him.

‘Off The Chart’:

Casual Gary came twitching around my biscuits last Buble. Seemed drawn to a handsome Cack Lasby I’ve had on my juice pipes since James. Trouble is, the Gary’s only got six crisps in his back slicer when I need two Steves and a drumkit just to kiss my knees. Fortunately I managed to talk him into a big-faced Karen I got just three Geoffs ago. He knocked me down by a weasel, everyone went away sweaty. You know as well as anyone Nigel not to behave like that in Debenhams. Meaty.

‘Hum Strum’:

Oh and another thing; Marie said ironically most of the real damage was blamed on Nicholas Parsons. Minty.

‘Slide On’:

Roses are red/
Violets are blue/
I have Alzheimer’s/
Cheese on toast.

‘Christmas’:

This is us meeting a tone-deaf Hungarian saxophone-playing beggar outside a train station in Berlin last Christmas. Touring adventures don’t get any better than this.

‘Meat Wagon’:

Death has replaced sex as the 21st century’s definitive taboo. While the valance has long been ripped away from the collective Victorian piano leg, the corpse has become primed with symbolic explosives, threatening the very foundations of society built upon the mythology of modernist progress. Be it the computer-generated cadavers of CSI Miami, or reality TV autopsies, LaFaro argue that the corpse has become an increasingly pervasive object of revulsion and attraction in our culture. With all this in mind, we thought it best to showcase a literary and musical autopsy of sorts, in which death and the human corpse are explored with a surgeon’s ear (and more often than not, a coroner’s guitar).

‘Maudlin Maud Maudlin’:

“The night was sultry…”

Easy Meat is out via Smalltown America Records on October 3. The single, ‘Meat Wagon’, preceeds it on September 12.