Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds: Iscariot The Ladder

Medway's murderous avians and their wolfish frontman return with freshly sharpened beaks & claws, offering an ambitious and focused second album whose breadth of influence and mood is matched by its no-nonsense brevity.

The debut Lupen Crook album felt like a rather labyrinthine affair. Although it clocked in at an admittedly modest 42 minutes, there was nevertheless a frequently bewildering sense of disorientation as its fifteen short, sharp shocks sparked off in all directions, illuminating briefly without any lasting sense of enlightenment. Even its creator commented in retrospect that Accidents Occur Whilst Sleeping "was very stop-starty... it suffers from a sense of suffocation."

It doesn't come as any surprise, then, to find that the second album is a (relatively) back-to-basics affair. With six of its ten tracks coming in under less than three minutes (and none of the remainder reaching four), Iscariot The Ladder is precisely two thirds the length of its predecessor. It manages to feel like a much more honed, coherent offering whilst retaining the band's characteristically intense range of musical and lyrical exploration.

The overall sound is a glorious fusion of garage rock, mordant folk and lethargic ska, interspersed with incongruous influences such as Victorian music-hall burlesque (Sympathy, Sunshine And The Catatonic Kiss...), New Orleans funeral marches (Staghead & Monster), Brubeck-like jazz (The Critic) and tempestuous Latin fiestas (Splits 'n' Differences). Far from being a directionless mish-mash, it absorbs such ingredients in the same spirit as vintage Bowie or Clash.

This melange of styles doesn't fit particularly neatly into the prescriptive genres of the current post-Wire, post-Libertines musical environment, which is of course entirely a good thing. Ultimately, though, it's not that difficult to categorise: from the tender reflectiveness of The Number Of Frames to the spittle-flecked rage of Lucky Six, this is a literate, baroque punk album of minor-chord symphonies and introspective protest songs.

Some tracks are more straightforward than others. Summer Time snarls bad-temperedly about feeling seasonally affected and disorderly in the June sunshine. Young Love undermines its joyous depiction of youthful romance with a cautionary tale of "black instruction". The Critic gives the object of its derision a deranged savaging and Splits 'n' Differences addresses a lover in alternately goading and defensive tones. Elsewhere, it's more difficult to work out what's going on.

Cackle & The Crown offers fragmentary hints of institutionalised bullying before burning down the building. The Number Of Frames is a fluttering, monochrome lament of regret. In Matthew's Magpie the bird embodies an intense but rather impenetrable level of symbolism (one for sorrow?). Similarly, in Staghead & Monster a phantasmagoria of images lurches captivatingly from fighting scorpions to "peachy-raw innards", lost in its own "diabolic logic of the metaphoric world."*

The strongest and most powerful moment is the reworking of his debut single that closes the album. Lucky Six is a corrosive howl of rage on behalf of an abused girl whose only refuge is the mind-numbing litany of the six times table, repeated ad nauseam until it blots out her appalling reality. It's difficult to guess this from the song, though, whose combination of impressionistic and too-specific lyrics works as an anthem for many different strains of disenfranchisement.

"You've been losing weight in all the wrong places / You know you're being fucked, but you can't see their faces / Where's your lucky six?"

Sometimes there's a sense of dogged malice in these songs that seems to position Lupen Crook as a detached, amoral narrator in the vein of Gormenghast's Steerpike or A Clockwork Orange's Alex, but there's more to him than that. Summing up his feelings at the end of the 2007 on his MySpace blog, he describes his music as "songs of sadness, psychosis and hope." It's this latter element that seems to be overlooked so frequently by reviewers and critics.

There's a sense of compassion behind the spleen, an implicit belief that the world can be made better by detailing its failings in such graphic detail. This fulminating optimism underpins a skewed, highly articulate and occasionally vicious commentary on contemporary Britain, filtered through a scabrous Medway perspective of poorly-lit cobbled streets, crumbling forts & castles, vanished dockyards and half-empty retail park developments.

At times Iscariot The Ladder strikes me as a quintessentially English album: ugly, brutal, belligerent, disaffected, pissed-off and yet still tender. It's almost Dickensian in its occasional hints of a campaigning element behind the grotesque and frequently doom-laden tales of social observation. Yet it's also very European, infused with a sense of radical passion that recalls Brel's fevered, histrionic ruminations on low life and high cabaret, or Brecht's social(ist) realism.

Of this I'm absolutely certain: Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds offer one of the most consistently original musical visions that I've come across in a long time. Simultaneously familiar and fresh, Iscariot the Ladder isn't a perfect album by any means. However, there are far more interesting adjectives to describe it: vibrant, innovative, dramatic and thought-provoking, to name but a few. It's an essential bout of uneasy listening for an increasingly risk-averse world.

Iscariot The Ladder is released on Tap 'n' Tin Records on Monday.

Further reading & listening

• DiS ("lacerates and engages without truly taking off")
• NME ("a mediocre Oasis bore")
• The Times ("bawdy swing to kitchen-sink Gothicism")
• New-Noise.Net ("we can't recommend this enough")
• Whisperin & Hollerin ("the benchmark has been set for album of 2008")
• GIGWISE ("dark and dissatisfied but not overblown")
• Clickmusic recent gig review ("thrilling, fulfilling and spine-chilling")
• BBC Radio Kent Unsigned session & interview (RealAudio, 20 mins)
• MySpace: Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds

This review also appears in issue 4 of DrunkenWerewolf magazine.

Posted by Hg on Friday 01 February 2008 at 09:29.
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