Crooked Timber (Deluxe Gold)

That's how I would describe this Therapy? album. I cannot think of a band with more sides to them than this 3-piece. Every album has been different and this one is no exception.

Following the *quite dire* One Cure, this album does everything opposite to the last one. There are no singles. There is a LOT of experimental stuff and there's good production.

The last time i remember them doing such an album was 'Suicide Pact...' - a genius album.

This album doesn't quite hit those heights but my, isn't it loverly? There's such depth from beginning to end. I found the album hitting it's stride mid-way, with 'exile' 'crooked timber' and 'I told you' proving to be the best songs on the album. Each features a beautiful (on a therapy? album??) subtle melody, carefully rammed down your throat with crunchy guitars and techno drumming. Therapy? have gone for a deep, atmospheric feel this time. The production deserves a credit here - if it hadn't been so well mixed and edited, this could have come sounding awful. But it didn't and I know tonight i won't sleep, grinding my teeth in frustration. Therapy? have quite simply done what they do best - create an album that sounds nothing like the current musical taste of the moment.

Simply beautiful.

Therapy? are one of Britain's most underrated bands. Like Motorhead, like The Fall, they plough a lonely furrow, always the same, always different. The general consensus is that they never topped 1994's diamond-brilliant 'Troublegum' - but the truth is, they never even tried to.
They are also one of Britain's most unique bands. Not through being self-consciously arty or inacessible, but simply because their music is highly distinctive, oozing character, and makes entirely new flavours from their influences. Those influences, moreover, come largely from a glorious and now mostly forgotten period in the 1980s when hardcore punk became darker, wilder, weirder and more messed-up than it had ever been before. One thinks of Black Flag, Big Black, Scratch Acid, the Alternative Tentacles and Amphetamine Reptile bands...smart, funny, angry guys all.
After 2006's 'One Cure Fits All', which seemed a little sparse and patchy (much like Husker Du's rushed-sounding late-period albums, actually), this new one is Therapy?'s most bleak and introspective work since 1999's bug-eyed, claustrophobic nightmare 'Suicide Pact - You First'.
Mortality seems much on Andy Cairns' mind. "Time's attrition grinds these landscapes," he wheedles to himself on the desolate title track, the aural equivalent of driving through barren countryside, before imagining himself a ghost haunting those left behind: "My shade will comfort you..."
It's a little disconcerting to have Cairns (a disarmingly cheerful chap in real life) intoning, with no illusion, lines like "One of these days, when nature spring cleans, I'll be part of the flotsam that goes," on the closing, coldly purposeful prowl of 'Bad Excuse For Daylight". But perhaps it's healthy, in a strange way, to approach the void with neither fear nor regret, as he seems to be doing.
He also has other existential freakouts, concerning identity, on 'The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself', this opener as carefully paced and murderously precise as the closer. "Am I just a noise the brain makes?...there is nothing in the mind except the mind itself." Philosophical musings like this are unusual territory, to say the least.
There are upbeat moments. 'Clowns Galore' revolves around the screwiest razor-wire riff this side of Big Black's 'Passing Complexion'. And 'Magic Mountain', the album's highlight, is something unprecendented in Therapy?'s career so far. A ten-minute instrumental piece, it breaks the album's mood by being quirky and playful, the guitar making whirring, laughing sounds as it rises and falls and chases its tail (you can even hear it deliver a punchline at one point). I don't know if the title refers to Lightning Bolt's 'Hypermagic Mountain', but there is a similar dementedly effervescent vibe to LB throughout (albeit much less noisy).
This is a damn good album, full of surprises, and the product of warped, curious, intelligent minds. Therapy? have a dwindling audience these days it would appear, and that's a small tragedy. Appreciate them, 'cause there's no one else like them. (Alright, apart from maybe Andy Falkous' McLusky and Future Of The Left...but that's another story.)

That Therapy? were ever big is a bit of an anomoly. 15 years since they were on the cusp of world domination, the Irish trio battle determindedly on. Enjoying the struggle. It now seems odd that their template : dense military, tribal percussion, subterranean bass, buzzsaw guitars and barked, furious vocals, ever touched the public heart. In many ways, when they were huge, it was the wrong way round. If anything, Therapys? spiritual home was more akin to Black Flag, Big Black, and the abrasive, live Joy Division tapes. A roar of anger against a cruel, unthinking world.

The new Therapy? worldview is more succinct. No longer headlining huge rooms across Europe, the cottage industry T? do things with a furious efficiency. Born through necessity, the mother of invention, this band hit the stopwatch and compress years of experience and songwriting in a frantic race to the end of their studio time. The compulsion of this music - not made through habit or to fund luxury jets but through artistic requirement ; a world where it is harder not to play music than it is to live the life ; where this music exists because it must, not because it wants, makes "Crooked Timber" a keen listen. The music is on a leash and reaching for escape. It opens with the pummelling "The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself", and just keeps tunneling through the Earth to the core.

There are no singles on this album. Just a set of well-crafted, compelling songs designed for ears that need to feel guitars screaming in their ear. ""Exiles" sounds like the best Joy Division song you've never heard. And after that, there is "Sonambulist" which takes millionaire Irish rock stars down a peg, even if it doesn't demonstrate so obviously. Album highlight through is "Magic Mountain" - 10 minutes of furious prog-metal riffage that sounds like Anvils being thrown from God onto the devout. "Crooked Timber" is a fine record. And Therapy? Need you as much as you need Therapy. Recommended.