+ Gin Palace record reviews +

THINGS I USED TO LOVE ABOUT YOU

Insanity lurks in every groove, crevice and copy-controlled watermark... Madness, we got it manic and magnificent...

If you prefer your rock a little more jittery in it's straightjacket, or more beserk, there's The Gin Palace whose 'Things I Used To Love About You' is an 80-second hate-howl - translated from the original Lydonese - directed at a 'Beer-swilling, tequila-drinking, knicker-sniffing, stripper-licking low-down SON OF A BITCH!' that'll make you nauseous, angry, apalled, scared, laugh like a maniac, ejaculate copiously and feel disgusted with yourself (but secretly elated) in it's first 15 seconds. After which you'll smash it with a hammer and have to take a long bath before rushing to the record shop to do it all again. Mffff.

Mark Beaumont

Upfront CD-Single version of the first Gin Palace single on Artrocker with a special sleeve and limited to 100 copies.

The sound is like a female Bo Diddley fronting th' Faith Healers but without a bass player. Just two tracks that will have you reaching for the repeat button

The weekly e-zine mail-out releases a hotly-warranted act via its same-name label-offshoot

Comparisons to the ‘Stripes and co. abound, but forget them – this London trio makes the Detroit posse look like manufactured pop-pansies.

Understand that this statement is based on less than a minute and half’s worth of evidence, and you’ll start to understand the excitement this band should be causing. Because this ‘evidence’ is the noisiest, most sexually and venomously charged bastard prodigy of sound two instruments and a voice could inconceivably produce.

Meaghan Wilkie’s vocals are slurred like drunken and rusty daggers through the ex in question, each one damning him the more until the cacophony ends with his utter dismissal as a ‘low-down son of a bitch’. It doesn’t sound all that aggressive from where you’re sat now… maybe it’s safer that way.

But f**k safety – that’s exactly what this 45 does. Punk to its very soul (if it hasn’t sold it already); imagine Lightning Bolt if they were sexy, with Brody Dalle on vocals, if Dalle could inspire the same degree of fear and love that Wilkie so unfathomably does. You will feel as if a train has hit you, and that if only you could have known how good it felt you would have been doing it for years.

P.S. Don’t stand in front of trains – that’d be stupid. Just buy this record.

Kevin Molloy - Written on 15/06/2004 14:52:41

Rating ****/5

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