Everybody’s doing it. Reforming, that is. The idea of so many 90s bands getting back together and cashing in on the nostalgia trip has about as much appeal as a cold, congealed omelette from the night before – as if we needed a resurrected TFI Friday to prove the point. Tepid indie bands, churning out the hits, reliving their glory years… no thanks.
What’s more interesting is seeing bands who never had any hits in the first place reuniting. Loop have showed themselves to be an exhilarating lie act after all these years, and last year’s double header with former tour-mates Godflesh provided a much-needed reminder that the best music of the 90s wasn’t your standard R1 fodder (unless you were listening to John Peel, of course).
The re-emergence of notoriously trippy drug imbibers Terminal Cheesecake in 2013, after almost 20 years, is quite a deal: emerging in the late 1980s, they were the first signing to cult label Wiija, who would subsequently bring the world Silverfish, Therapy?, Huggy Bear, Cornershop, and the criminally underrated Jacob’s Mouse, amongst others. And their sound, while drawing on myriad sources ranging from Pink Floyd to Butthole Surfers, is one that can be considered truly unique.
This live album, which captures the band delivering a career-spanning set, which draws out the warped psychedelic and monstrously heavy prog elements of their sound and cranks it up to the max, to brain (and cheese) melting effect, conjuring liquefying noise with a warped weirdness that’s almost Gong-like at times.
The build-up is epic: the drifting, doodling psychedelia of the 10-minute ‘Fake Loop’ is a meandering trip during which eddying feedback slowly builds and strains in a haze of reverb. It meanders into the looping. ‘Bladdersack’, which brings some weight to the squalling guitar assault. ‘Johnny Town Mouse’ is the first track where they really let fly proper for the first time, and it’s savage, its gritty downtuned drone reminiscent of Fudge Tunnel’s ‘Hate Song’.
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You don’t listen to a band like Terminal Cheesecake for the catchy choruses, or even the tunes as such. You listen to Terminal Cheesecake to for mind expansion, and to experience brain melt. The vast expanses of ‘Blow Hound’ are immense deserts strewn with sonic wreckage. They don’t do short versions of the songs, either, each one an expanded, exploratory, sprawling epic workout. ‘Herbal Spaceflight’ is every bit the heavy psychedelic prog trip you’d expect, a lumbering bass and soaring guitar reaching out into the most kaleidoscopic regions of inner space.
The 18-minute ‘VCL’ (or ‘Valium Chicken Leg’, a title that’s as Butthole Surfers as it gets) is a slow-burning climax, and in referencing Hendrix while singing about chickens revels in glorious absurdity.
The bottom line is that this is a cracking live album that tells us that reformations aren’t always lame nostalgic cash-ins, and that Terminal Cheesecake haven’t dated – or mellowed – one iota.
Terminal Cheesecake Online
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