Review Summary: A brilliantly odd swansong from England’s zombie-obsessed thrashers
There’s something rather charming about the
The Awakening, something very retro. For their third and final album Send More Paramedics decided to release a double album, with the two discs split right down the middle stylistically. The first sees their crossover-thrash style tightened up, given a lick of polish, then spat out looking stronger than anything they’d done before. The zombie theme still dominates the lyrical content, with the odd film sample thrown in for dramatic effect (‘Follow Your Programming’), but the tone of the music has been tilted a little away from punk, towards ye olde metal. It’s still punky thrash, but just a touch cleaner and crisper than before, making it zip along with real verve. Hell, there’s even the odd solo flung about, most notably in the rousing ‘Blood Fever’ and the brisk ‘I Am Every Dead Thing’. The vocalist, B’Hellmouth (probably not his Christian name) sticks mostly to the classic-punk yelp, with the occasional dip into more screamy waters, but he delivers it all with conviction and heart, preventing the subject matter from ever seeming camp. There’s almost no variety over the course of the disc, just different shades of the same enjoyable
shit, but let’s face it, who wants depth from zombiecore?
But wait…
The second disc of
The Awakening is a movie soundtrack, an ode to the horror films that inspired the band’s aesthetic – it’s entirely instrumental, without a live instrument in sight. The surprising thing is how tastefully it’s put together, so that among the gloomy, 70’s-cool of tracks like ‘Amid the Ruins’ and ‘Pervasive Infection’, there’s rather beautiful numbers like ‘Yangtze River’, nuzzling on the underbelly of ambience. Go for a walk at night with this blasting through your headphones and you’ll be in
Escape From New York one minute and
Dawn of the Dead the next; there’s moody synth, echoing bleeps and tinkling piano everywhere. And yeah, it’s a little tongue-in-cheek at points, but that suits the thematic vibe, and even gives a sense of real homage to an often reviled slice of pop-culture, one the band obviously have a great deal of affection for. Not all of the tracks boast the same quality when it comes to composition, like the rather dull ‘Genetic Combination’, but overall it hangs together remarkably well, leaving the all-too-brief career of Send More Paramedics with a finale to be proud of.
