Review: Total Fucking Destruction ‘…to be alive at the end of the world’

With more splits to their name than a yoga influencer’s Instagram and a general recording history that would put the grindiest of grinders to shame, trying to pick through Total Fucking Destruction’s back catalogue is a daunting prospect; for them to deliver something that still manages to sound like an outlier to all of that, now that’s impressive. Yet that’s exactly what …to be alive at the end of the world does, and yes, it’s all lowercase.

Total Fucking Destruction ‘…to be alive at the end of the world’

First off, the title track opens the album with a lengthy (well, 5 minutes, which is positively epic in Total Fucking Destruction terms) post-psychedelic jam that owes considerably more to Spiritualized and The Beatles’ late-period experimentation than to anything within grind history, John Zorn-related work notwithstanding. It’s surprisingly hypnotic, the repeated refrain of ‘To be alive at the end of the world, to be so young at the end of the world’ drawing the listener down into a lysergic fugue as Pingdum steeps a lilting raga melody in swirling, spiralling reverb before everything spins off into a freaky-deeky solo excursion that feels way more earnest than it has any right to be.

After that scene-setting, the rest of the album hits like a wrecking ball, primarily consisting of skittish jazz-grind that occasionally leans more towards the first part of that description, like a demonstration of power’s flighty funk-jazz / power violence explosion switch-up is particularly noteworthy. Then it’s sometimes just explosive – stone bomb, doctor butcher and the awesomely titled yelling at velcro, which consists solely of a 20-second long scream (presumably directed at a length of unruly hook-and-loop fastener) all waste little time in getting their points across. Buried in the midst of this is their irreverent, breezy take on Big Boys sound on sound that infuses the originals sing-song sincerity with a touch of Dinosaur Jr’s- jangling, squealing charm.

It’s tortured, dripping with disgust and dissatisfaction, and everything from the bile-flecked howls to Richard Hoak’s scattershot drumming…

Finally, there’s the star-spangled banner. Yes, that one. Ever since Hendrix’s Woodstock take on this bastion of US patriotism, it has become a symbol of musical protest, so it’s tempting to wonder why every punk band these days aren’t offering up their own mangled rendition – but hey, at least Total Fucking Destruction have the guts to try it. It’s tortured, dripping with disgust and dissatisfaction, and everything from the bile-flecked howls to Richard Hoak’s scattershot drumming, exists to drive the point home. Cue five minutes of silence, then a Star-Spangled reprise that doesn’t so much flog the dead horse as drag its fly-infested corpse through the streets as public spectacle.

So all in all, we have a short release that is made up in large part of one sprawling psych jam and one burst of protracted silence; the rest is weird, noisy and obtuse. You can’t help but feel that’s the point though. TFD have always been wilfully weird and …to be alive fits that ethos well.

The point of the album still stands, a recorded act of rejection of norms, of social mores and small-c conservatism, but it knows that art and humour will always make a statement more readily than brute force. In that light, maybe this record isn’t such an outlier after all.

Label: Translation Loss Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp

Scribed by: Dave Bowes