If you’re not familiar with this four piece from Oregon who sport the barest of hairy chests, most luxurious of moustaches, and apparently get their wardrobe cues from a ‘Big Bottom’ era Derek Smalls mixed with Rob Halford’s ideal man, then I suggest you should check out previous reviews (see Ave Noctum passim), and lay hands on their prior releases as you’ve also missed out on a fuck load of fun. Dubbing their own lo-fi style as “Street Doom”, ‘Dead End’ is the latest addition to their growing catalogue.
Bizarrely for a stripped back guitar/bass/drum/vocals combo, the album opens with ‘Streets of Death’, a slice of eighties electronic cheese that comes off as a cross between the theme music to Buckaroo Banzai’s next yet to be made movie and the opening bars of Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, complete with those annoying as all hell “doop, doop, doop” drum beats (anyone of my vintage knows and should loathe that sound), presumably in an effort to hook in new found fans of the currently fashionable synthwave, a sound that is quickly slapped aside with the back of a studded leather fingerless glove care of the drunken sprint of ‘Judgement Day’, a song loaded to the brim with neck wrenching riffs and air punching hooks. The album continues apace with the grooving stomp of ‘Dead End’ that is itself succeeded by a punk tinged ‘Nightmare’, surely itself a testament to what happens to your music if you grow up on a steady diet of The Misfits pumping out of your stereo.
Slowing down to the pace of the doom after which R.I.P. half name their sound, in the opening bars at least before the slamming starts, comes ‘One Foot In The Grave’, and it would be all too easy to imagine the band touring back in the day with Saint Vitus when those titans were young upstarts tacked on to assorted punk tours to keep them on the road; indeed, if you were to draw a Ven diagram where Doom and Punk intersected, the middle would be the ground in which this music is firmly found. ‘Death Is Coming’ follows hard, heavy, and free from any frills and trickery, and after the slower thud of ‘Moment of Silence’ R.I.P. go all instrumental and cinematic with ‘Buried Alive’, an eerie track that could be the title music to any of the eighties horror movies of that title (go on IMDB and pick one, it would work for pretty much any of them), proving that the band are not just one trick ponies, the album being rounded out by more schlockfest influenced rockers in the form of ‘Out of Time’ and ‘Dead of the Night’. Hell, to be honest, any of the ten tracks that make up the album could be named after or themed on the sort of VHS shockers that some of us saw back in the day.
Whilst clearly serious about their music, R.I.P. don’t take themselves seriously, and ‘Dead End’ comes across as plain, simple, uncomplicated, and agenda free fun, a sound track to a few drinks and a laugh with mates, as and when that is allowed again of course. And hey, in these times of general shitiness, that is not a bad thing.
(8/10 Spenny)
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