For those wont to say “that’s well dark,” at the slightest hint of edgy content, here is true darkness. The third album by London alt-folk oddballs David Cronenberg’s Wife is stewed in pitch-black lyrical themes and revels in dragging its listeners to truly uncomfortable places. If this album had been made by an artist with a higher profile, I suspect it would have been greeted by a chorus of disapproving voices from every side of the ideological spectrum.
Musically, the four-piece plough a furrow not dissimilar to The Fall or LIARS, but only if both had joined forces to create a new and deeply sinister punk roots soundtrack to The Wicker Man. With such an instrumental bedding of galloping discord, things would be unsettling enough if the songs were about cars and candyfloss but no, the recurring theme is twisted, diseased male sexuality, delivered in a deadly sneer as first person narrative by frontman Tom Mayne. Not for the faint-hearted, numbers such as the brilliant, evil “Spiked” – about drug-facilitated sexual assault - carve to the protagonist’s vicious predatory core (“Can it be a crime if she doesn’t know about it?/And did it hurt with me inside her? Well, I truly doubt it”) while the scumbag preying on pissed post-pub girls in “The Pied Piper of Maidenhead” is even more shocking (“Sometimes I wear protection, sometimes I don’t do that/These girls aren’t quite yet old enough to have anything that bad”). Elsewhere there are riff-fuelled, driving numbers such as “Pain Ahead”, “The Man at the Back of the Woods” and the rowdy closer, "Man", which are less specific but whose overall tone is no less unsettling.
This is properly twitched-out nastiness – “For Laura Kingsman”, a paedophile love song, is actually difficult to stomach – but it’s also a no-gimmicks, forceful collection of tight, catchy weird-rock that provokes thought in a way very few albums do.
Watch the video for "The Pied Piper of Maidenhead"
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