Review of The Sunshine Underground's CD "Put You in Your Place"

The Sunshine Underground: Put You in Your Place

Well, bugger me. There was a moment a while back when I dared to wonder (gasp!) whether The Sunshine Underground could ever produce another song as gut-churningly ace as 'Commercial Breakdown' - I mean, come on, that's a pretty elephantine, Trojan-like task, right? But, good heavens, they have. And it's better. And I'm now on the verge of a coronary after jittering agitatedly around the lounge watching a particularly violent episode of 'Frasier' (he's got Niles pinned to the bed! What's going on?!) on mute soundtracked by the most infectious piece of viral itchiness ever to sneeze its way out of my speakers. 'Put You In Your Place' is a burning, peppery stomp of incensed, incendiary bile and rabid bop. Yippee!

Inflamed with a myriad of filthy chemicals spewing out of his mouth, Craig Wellington's voice bubbles and screams "Well I just don't think I'm coming down..." into the microphone in some sort of wrenched, boggle-eyed, insane ecstasy, the guitars rupturing rhythmic spleens all over the place with their frenzied, erratically-accented frantic attacks and, oh... wait for it... there it is, the old ill-treated-but-loved-like-a-member-of-the-family cowbell (or perhaps a woodblock), bearing its latest bludgeoning with dignity and pride. God bless it, it works hard, that sturdy little piece of percussion. Craig gargles with grit, screaming and panting blue murder with blood searing through his lungs, sounding as wolverine as ever on the paranoid howl of B-side 'They Got A Hold Of Us'.

Here's a record that sweats attitude with its clanging metal-on-metal clash of fantastically-layered noise patterns, causing a quake so huge that there are great big quarries of rock caving in all over the country as we speak. It's a riot on a building site; an intravenous, surging hit of cellular, stomach-grabbing, stampeding, flat-out brilliance that hurls chunks of concrete at windows; a song that plunges an anchor into your spine, grabs hold and flings you, splat, at the walls.

If you don't collapse into a fit of some sort of body-popping hysteria, throw a can of beer over yourself and toss your head and hair around like an enraged baboon whilst listening to this then, quite frankly, you are probably dead.

Bravo, boys.

• www.thesunshineunderground.co.uk

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