Review Summary: “mclusky were a band between 1999 and 2005 and now they are a band again. I know, mindblowing.”
That self-deprecating little spit-blurb on the Mclusky bandcamp page isn’t so much of a sum-up of Mclusky in the year 2025, as it is a little cellulose capsule of their whole acerbic worldview. That conscious low-effort pisstake remark is a fine form for this band to return in. The hell with fanfare anyway, Mclusky’s back, and the world keeps turning. The title of the album bears this out as well, almost too on-the-nose in its downplaying of a band with as rabid a cult following as this one. If The Future of the Left was rather more than a simple extension of that acid wit of Andrew Falkous, the return of Mclusky is the uncut pile re-saran-wrapped and plunked down on the kitchen table, ready for consumption.
It’s so refreshing to have the door kicked in so confidently on “the unpopular parts of a pig” (Mclusky have foregone title case at this stage in their career). The stop-start riffs and nasal rhyming are Mclusky at their most ferocious, and Falkous at his most obliquely scathing. “Is it as fresh as it once was” is the locked groove that keeps repeating itself with this record and
every other goddamn band reunion, but it’s a little reassuring that Falkous’ sneer is still sticking it to the absurd as it ever has been. Get these playground rhymes all gunged up with alienation once again please, and brush my fear right into the dustbin along with the dried macaroni and cat hair from my kitchen floor. We’re back on the threshing floor of absurd slogans and Joey Santiago-as-Diogenes riff salads, and there’s plenty of wheat to be knocked out of our lackadaisical chaff shells. We’ve just got to let our trepidation settle a little bit before we can digest this on its own merits and cut it off from the comeback tropes that have become so entrenched.
All that said, there’s been more than enough fermentation of our vinegar and urea concoction to make this the genuine Mclusky brew; popping this bottle reveals a bitterness bouquet undiminished by two decades of aging. The scorn with which Falkous sneers the line “exploding kids can kill the mood” is caustic (any ideas why?), and still very much in keeping with the frenetic garage-rock they’ve barely left behind in the span of 2 decades. The Pixies worship of Hate the Polis isn’t anything new for Mclusky, they’ve been venerating that array of timbres and vibes since day one, but inverting that mystical pop eros into something as grotesque and venomous as it is indelibly British. It’s an almost Kafkaesque (as kafkaesque novelist franz kafka) cruelty in the buzzing, rattling sound-contraptions undergirding each venomous punchline on this album, and their form is right where it’s always been.
One new element that surprises a bit: Mclusky is actually served somewhat well here for Albini’s absence, as lamented as it is. They are a band that thrives on their sardonic, smirking punchlines, and those were always at least a little undercut by Steve’s astringent engineering, a style that much better served bands for whom bleakness was the punchline, whereas for Mclusky it’s the setup, and the target. As Viagra Boys so helpfully observed earlier this month, everything is now dumb, which is hilarious. So always with Mclusky, but Falkous and the boys have always been a bit more clever, and a great deal funnier, and a whole lot more rock n’ roll. This new iteration of the Mclusky sound is fuller, there’s more auditory meat to drape the satire over, and the fuller, scuzzier low end (see the deranged swing of “cops and coppers”) gives the album a greater sense of sonic heft.
But, the sad fact goes, we’re not in the glory days, and you can be as clever as ever, keep growing musically, do fun new things and if it doesn’t have that gasoline poured into it, it isn’t really going to explode the way you want it to. It’s not the Jesus Lizard’s return, at least not quite, Mclusky certainly still turn a phrase with the best of them and Falkous is still as irascible a yawper as he ever was, but the intangible sort of heat that made Mclusky such a youthful-sounding band has given way to something that’s hardly a mellowing, but more a thinning. Their band is still better than your band, but maybe a bit more co-co-co-coke inspiration might have been welcome. So, while Mclusky’s return deserves more than the laconic announcement they gave it, one gets the sense that their laconicism was perhaps more defensive than they might be letting on. They’re not tired, and their return more than holds its own as a direct progression of Mclusky, but there’s a sense that they themselves feel like expectations should be tempered just a hair, a self-awareness that ends up dangerously close to hamstringing the cocksure arrogance that’s such a crucial part of their charisma. Me, though, I’m just here to celebrate the return of these Cardiff legends.
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