Album Review: Just Mustard, Heart Under

The Mary Wallopers, David Keenan, Jinx Lennon, The Corrs – Dundalk artists defy easy categorisation. Rolling off that same town’s oddball assembly line, many labels can be affixed to Just Mustard – shoegaze, industrial, experimental, even dream-pop. But machine-head psychedelia might be as good a place to start as any.

Just as The Stooges at times sounded like a distillation of the noise from the factories of Motor City, Just Mustard tap into the dissonance of a dystopian cosmopolis. On ‘I Am You’, vocalist Katie Ball – in a style reminiscent of Can’s Damo Suzuki – asks “Can you change my head?”

Guitarists David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoglu drone and hiss, and Shane Maguire’s primal drumming is seriously propulsive. Tellingly, the band cite David Lynch as an influence, and you can see why: several of the discordant, surrealist soundscapes on Heart Under have a decidedly Lynchian feel.

Comparisons to Seventeen Seconds-era Cure will also rightly be made, and there’s a good dollop of Aphex Twin in the mix as well. Regardless, the best advice is to quit the taxonomy, and explore the fresh territory this remarkable band are mapping. Heart Under is a thoroughly fascinating record.

9/10

Out now on Partisan Records