The Wonder Stuff

Bile Chant / Escape from Rubbish Island

This is a come-back long-awaited by some, long-feared by others. On this evidence, those who have awoken from their slumbers quaking in terror at the prospect of a return to the airwaves from the Midlands stodgiest export since the faggot meatball, have been well justified in their petrification.

It’s difficult to imagine a more crudely turned and cynical record than this audio equivalent of vanity publishing. Miles Hunt - who’s vitriol was once endearing in the same way as a mangy Jack Russell

snapping toothlessly at one’s ankles - pursues the same angry but ‘oh, so witty’ young man schtick as ever. Problem is that now he comes across as some jack-boot wearing, middle-aged closet Tory with an axe to grind over the taxes he has to stump up to keep those ‘damn Kosovars’ in Pumas.

‘Bile Chant’ begins with an intro lifted straight from Timberlake’s ‘Like I Love You’, a track which – due to the Neptunes skilled touch – bounded gracefully through four minutes of glorious Flamenco-funk. This waddles artlessly through an interminably pallid and wilfully vituperative reworking of the Beatles ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, barely modernised by the odd technological whir and beep.

‘Escape from Rubbish Island’ raises the bar a little, but it’s still low enough for a three-legged mouse to pole-vault, and it sounds as though Hunt may have intended it to be a duet with Sheryl Crow.

If you feel that you have to buy a Wonder Stuff record, avail yourself of the urgent and crafty ‘Eight-Legged Groove-Machine’, and save yourself the effort of Frisbee-ing this tripe to the bottom of the garden.

http://www.thewonderstuff.co.uk

Raven