Some Gay For Johnny Depp album reviews

Some corking reviews of the new Gay For Johnn Depp album are filtering through. Watch out for reviews/features in Kerrang, Terrorizer, Rock Sound, Big Cheese, Total Guitar etc. Plus these little online beauties:

ROCK MIDGETS

Exploding out of the blocks with the razor sharp guitars and throat ripping screams of the delightfully titled 'Cumpassion', Gay For Johnny Depp's debut full-length The Politic of Cruelty is a consummate lesson in uneasy listening. Bringing together twelve positively bile-infested chunks of molten hot hardcore in little over twenty minutes, it's a quite stunning statement of discontent. Fans of the band's well received EP's will be delighted to find that there's no concessions made here, with 'You Have a Theory, I Have a Gun' and 'Belief in God is So Adorable' being about as gloriously uncommercial a pair of singles as you're likely to hear all year, while closing track 'I Hate Our Freedom (Fuck You Gladys, I'm on Vacation)' is the kind of claustrophobic headfuck that will leave you nursing a migraine for days after one too many listens.

The notorious moniker and former glories of various band members may well have helped Gay For Johnny Depp garner a considerable amount of attention to date, but The Politic of Cruelty's unwavering quality proves beyond any doubt that they most definitely warrant it.

SLEAZE GRINDER

Experimental hardcore racket, tongue in cheek lampoonery and tom(or John)foolery of possibly the most would-be outed star this side of little Tom Cruise, senseless and purposefully tasteless art-school project, or simply blistering genome re-ordering schizo-punk of whirring guitars emitting Alien skin-scraping screeches, half-garrotted laryngeal cancers squeezed through a voice-box over toxic-shock rhythms lubed on the sticky residue of a bathroom speed laboratory. The dark, delirious underbelly to Turbonegro’s similarly themed homoerotic heroics, replacing their cock-rock pastiche with free-falling descents, literally, into the bowels of some benighted, abused and bull-buggered arse-end of society, as on Point The Finger (Juicy’s Last $).

Behind all the cock and cottaging obsessed ranting (see opener ‘Cumpassion’) some pertinent points are discernible such as the kiss-off on single You Have A Theory, I Have A Gun – ‘If you’ve never read a newspaper and want to be on TV – join the army’. A vile pounding indeed.

NEW NOISE

"While this thing is so violent it could only be arriving in modern times, it's also so gimmick-free it could have been birthed in any of the last three decades."

Now this is what punk rock should sound like. Gay For Johnny Depp’s third release, ‘The Politics Of Cruelty’, has got wit, venom, aggression, melody, authority-baiting abusiveness and even purist-pleasing production; the sort of thing that makes it sound like it was recorded in a cardboard box. But snotty attitude and shoddy sound values alone do not a punk classic make though so ‘…Politics…’ employs a few other neat tricks to get the job done.

For starters, instead of hammering every tone into the ground, the lo-fi nature of this actually brings each deadly spike and every piercing screech to the fore. Which means ‘Cumpassion’ is a cochlea-scraping racket, ‘You Have A Theory…’ sounds like it’s been solely engineered to attack your senses and ‘Noise’, is well, you get the idea. But then, after all that racket, when ‘Lights Out!’ unleashes its sublime indie hook, it comes as one of the best-sounding surprises of the year.

From there the soft, smooth and devilishly grating noises all combine with a fiery haste and fury that won’t just make your bones want to jive but carry you all the way to wherever this band are playing these songs live. You might not be desperate to revisit the aggressive, offensive fuzz on the CD every day but at least GFJD have plumbed something real, something raw. And while this thing is so violent it could only be arriving in modern times, it’s also so gimmick-free it could have been birthed in any of the last three decades.

This is the what Rival Schools would have sounded like if Walter Schreifels had remembered a little more of his past in Gorilla Biscuits, this is what Jello Biafra should be jamming to right now, this is a great big joyous ‘fuck you’ of a record. This is punk rock.

And, of course, this one:

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