Review Summary: who's scared, not me..
According to DIY legend, Edinburgh punks Fire Engines recorded their sole LP
Lubricate Your Living Room in a day, in two takes, and for less than fifty pounds; and the record sounds it through and through. An earnestly primitivist set, the band geared every bit of writing to their limited strengths - recoiling bass, cymbal-less drums that bash repetition, hysteric vocals that mostly figured as yelps and grunts, and wonky guitars that were prone to collapsing to noisy tantrums.
It's a stretch to tag any of Fire Engines' output as post-punk, even by the genre's pliant definitions; and the closest they came to resembling a contemporary on the scene or their Fast Product label were fellow Scots Gang of Four, who were also melding funk and punk, albeit in defter, more learned ways. None of that comes close to detracting anything from these beautifully crude and malformed songs.
Fire Engines stood out among their peers in the UK. Their sound eschewed moody tangents and stuck closer to Velvet Underground's subversive pop touch, splicing in the groove of dub and the dumb fun of disco, and somehow finding that sweet spot where unvaried constructs don't become monotonous, making for something highly danceable and ultimately more attuned to its surroundings than what it seems.
It's hard to tell whether
Lubricate Your Living Room came about as a stroke of blind luck, or some conceived aim, but either way, listening to the frantic little twists and shoves of "Get Up and Use Me," "Discord" and "New Thing in Cartons" is like watching something being taken apart and then put together in a dark room. It comes together as a golem, holding some basic idea of past form, weird bits sticking out, legs wobbly, mouth askew, fingers in knots. By hook or by crook, it's better than what it was before.
