The Deathset

Few people these days can get away with singing about how great their band is, right? Well hyperactive powerpop trio The Deathset do this to the extent that you actually believe that being a member of The Deathset is the best job on earth. Photos of their shows on their website – bustling sweat-fests with fans surrounding the band on all sides, crammed together like sardines and screaming the lyrics into the mic – certainly support this assertion.

'Intermission’ is 120 seconds of jacked up, kinetic two-chord chaos. The chorus is so cool it hurts: “Tape deck, select, burning wreck, broken neck, dirty speck, bitches wet, motherfuckin’ Deathset! / In your eye, weapons fly, don’t even try to feel our size, wonder why the people cry The motherfuckin’ Deathset!”

The album is littered with these in-your-face tornadoes that spin you round, upend you and are over before you’ve worked out what the hell just happened. On paper, this looks like the work of a bored music college student – few of the 18 tracks top two minutes, the omnipresent drum machine makes it trashy and lo-fi and the lyrics sound like they’re being sung by the cast of Sesame Street, but it’s still bloody brilliant.

The filler songs dotted about the place are, quite frankly, laughable, as if the band are so terrified of the pretentiousness complexity brings, that they feel the need to lower the tone every so often (‘Bla!’ is just one garage riff with someone simply gurgling “Blaaaa!” at the end). They do, however, have some wonderful pop songs, unfailingly delivered with spit and vitriol where appropriate. ‘Peak Oil’ even seems vaguely topical, despite the rest of the album being rigidly apolitical. ‘Day In The Wife’ is a hilarious hardcore punk assault about going into the supermarket and being mistaken for a woman (haven’t we all been there?)

Despite all the silliness, there are plenty of gold stars to be handed out on ‘Worldwide’, whether it’s the immediately catchy ‘Negative Thinking’ or the fiery mob chant of ‘Impossible’, the only downer being that after 25 exhausting minutes, it’s all over. But for The Deathset, it’s clearly not about writing an epic, it’s about concentrating a huge amount of energy and effort into being as cool as possible, for the shortest time possible, like a musical equivalent of James Dean.

The most glaring acknowledgement of this philosophy comes in ‘Around The World’: “Yeah we go around the world and we do what must be done / It’s a top secret mission and our enemies are wishin’ that they had a bigger gun / Yeah we do our best, we do our best to look good doing it.”

Of course, The Deathset do look good doing it, whatever the hell it is they’re doing, but from where we’re standing, they don’t even look like their trying.