Debut full-length for this UK bunch, who have led up to this release with a number of cassettes and singles that have successfully made their point of making outWorkin’ Man Noise Unit to be a band that cares only about producing no nonsense rock. With Play Loud, the title can be taken a couple ways, because on one hand this album needs to be played loud since it seems to be mastered at a bit of a lower volume…a clever trick that forces me into doing just what they want, and on the other hand the music itself is certainly of the loud rock variety that gradually finds me inching the volume higher and higher anyway. In the beginning, when I received and listened to their first cassette Drinkin’ Stella to Make Music to Drink Stella To, the music was more in the aggro/noise-rock vein of things, the notion and instruction in the liner notes to “play loud” was always there however. As the band has progressed, they’ve been edging into an area that is more of the 70’s riff-rock vein but dressed up with a larger amount of distortion/noise, kind reminiscent to stuff like Torche, Fu Manchu, Kyuss, and Karp. If anything, titles like “Smoke Like Hell”, “Icegrill 420” and “Black Lights” should give a sense of what to expect. If that’s your cup of tea, then Workin’ Man Noise Unit will likely be of interest as they are certainly capable of hanging in there with the more prominent bands of the genre and their mantra of “play loud” ends up being more than just for show

BUILT ON A WEAK SPOT

Riot Season is quickly becoming one of my favourite UK labels, not least because many of its signings seem to be snatching stoner rock back from the flagging clutches of the United States and infusing its Orange-amped phatness with more eccentrically British lyrical qualities. Earlier this year, the songs on Henry Blacker’s second LP jumped from one subject (i.e. seamen stranded on the ocean) to another (such as a “shit magus” who “stinks of cum and cooking sherry”) like a diverse collection of short stories or a succession of Monty Python sketches. Whereas their glamorously tanned Californian forbearers such as Fu Manchu sang about joy rides on sand dunes in boogie vans, Workin’ Man Noise Unit focus instead on Reading’s Inner Distribution Road. In their press release, the band describe the IDR as “a concrete blanket that snakes around the centre of the town, holding Reading in a sort of permanent stranglehold.” The runaway American dream of Highway 9, this ain’t. Born to run, we aren’t. Born to be asphyxiated by oppressive dual carriageways, are we. When not shouting at roads or confessing to an obsession with the atomic bomb, WMNU assert that “we’ve got nothing to say... but we will say it anyway” and amen to that. Sonically, Play Loud is packed with no-nonsense meat-feast riffs accompanied by a swirling background breeze. ‘Yeah, I Was Hypnotized’ hints towards a potential knack for Torche-esque poppiness before it audaciously decelerates to a sludgier wallow. Similarly, ‘Black Lights’ might have been categorized as a proper rock ballad if WMNU hadn’t buried its vocals in potato mash and black gravy and dubbed on a guitar track that resembles a distressed chimpanzee trying to screech its way out of its shit-covered cage. Another highlight, ‘Smoke Like Hell’, is basically Jane’s Addiction rewriting Oasis’s ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ in Clutch’s rehearsal space. It’s on this tune and the following couple of closing numbers (and particularly the bleakly political ‘Hate It’) that the band’s rowdy dual vocals start to remind you of Fugazi, which only sweetens the whole damn deal

THE QUIETUS