With our man Reef Conroy having already bravely taken the plunge into the fascinating depths of MCLUSKY’S “C-Sides”, your rather more tentative (read: ‘chicken’) reviewer can remain in the shallow waters of the Cardiff delta and enjoy the, er, slightly more approachable ‘A-Sides’, which has also been released as a single CD as well as part of the extensive 3CD set.
Because, once the gruff pleasure of singer/ guitarist Andy Falkous’s sleevenotes (“No farewell tour, a thousand TDK C-90s, various piss-poor attempts at merchandising, no premature deaths (at least at time of writing))” and the initial disbelief that this more-refusenik-than-thou trio could possibly have come up with enough catchy ‘hooks’ and ‘pop hits’ to merit a Singles collection has sunk in, one fact remains: Mclusky stubbed their steel toe-caps on a skipload of bloody good songs along the way.
Not that they didn’t try to disguise those ace tunes under a welter of distortion and Andy Falkous’s preferred vocal delivery: usually akin to a man having his testies gnawed by a sackful of rabid ferrets than simply ‘singing’, but these gleeful attempts at noisenik sabotage still refuse to destroy tracks as volcanic as the early Nirvana-relocate-to-Newport thrills of “Rice Is Nice”, the mad, overloading punk rock of “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” (hey, Mr.radio plugger, why’d you pass on that one?) and the looming, indie-metal of “Whoyouknow.”
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Indeed, there’s even (cough) progression of sorts here: not least when they got to the queasy “1956 And All That” (all what? The Hungarian uprising? Cardiff City’s dismal mid-50s run of form?) which sounds every bit as diseased as anything from The Birthday Party’s “Junkyard” and “Undress For Success” where the answering voice gets under your skin like a dose of DMSO. Arguably even better are the latter run of singles like “That Man Will Not Hang” - where the drums sound like rock breakers and Jon Chapple’s bassline could even eat JJ Burnel for breakfast – and “She Will Only Bring You Happiness” with that hilariously bitter couplet involving “note to invading aliens: avoid this town, like this town avoided us”, which still speaks volumes in itself.
Poor old Mclusky, then: always too awkward to comply, always too wilfully obscure to trouble the scorers and too couldn’t-be-arsed to leave a tidy corpse behind. But for all that “Mcluskyism – the A-sides” is a compact and compelling tribute and one which – against the odds – looks like setting the ‘posthumous adulation’ hare running. Who’d have thunk it?
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