Club Fandango

Somewhere in the cracks on the grimy, beer-splashed and fag-end strewn floor of the Church Of Mother-Fucking Rock And Roll are a ragtag crew of cathartic chaos-bringers, musical magicians with their wands misshapen and their guitars set to kill. Seizure-inducing blast-beats and brain-melting melodies delivered faster than a jackhammer up the shitter in some fucked-up Korean extreme flick: these are the jewels in their rusted crowns, still glittering, still brilliant. An Albatross are the kings of these men of wonder, amazement, befuddlement; men who make another dance so out of time it’d come as a surprise if said moves didn’t generate a black hole down the front, sucking attendees in from left, right and centre, crushing their bones like sea salt in a grinder, spitting blood like a malfunctioning SodaStream.

The Pennsylvania-spawned quintet do not fuck around; introductions and spaces for breath are needless follies: these songs come at all and sundry harder and faster harder and faster, the boards beneath our feet groaning under their weight; Eddie sings and screams and beats drums and climbs speakers and hangs by his boots from a rail almost certainly placed above the stage for reasons other than allowing a performer to play Batman on other peoples’ time. He shoves the microphone into his crotch and goes at it like a topless, drunk and dumb groupie is willing to receive; sweat doesn’t trickle so much as leap from his features, which contort throughout as a succession of songs – ‘songs’ in the ears of the conservative many blissfully unaware of the joys of music as razor-edged as this – from Blessphemy… are executed in a truly electrifying manner.

I’m pounding my palm on the PA, grossly out of time and not caring, while always making sure my escape route, should he turn nasty, is clear and well lit. I’m smiling from here, this ear, to here, the other; I’m concluding, after just two or three offerings – that’s two or three minutes, then – that leaving Battles (up t’road at the Scala) a little early was officially A Good Idea.

Music like this can’t really be explained in words; it takes noises, gurgles from the gut and moans from the decaying soul, to express what An Albatross set alight in a man. Sign language is reduced to fits, lip-reading to a slew of unprintable expletives. One hand on a hip and the other aloft: a Broadway pose for the cameras. This is what An Albatross make a man want to do, on a rainy evening, in the middle of a three-lane one-way main drag. It’s celebration and exuberance, the exorcising of discotheque demons who don’t ever realise they’re beat – they return night after night, and the process repeats. Dance, monkeys! Or we’ll slice you.

And, as the curtain rail doesn’t fall, the cracks beneath the mainstream grow a little wider. The Church’s doors are hanging off their hinges: make good your escape or strap yourself in and grin and bare it… all.