Why are Therapy? still around after twenty-plus years?
Well there are several reasons, chief amongst them being the fact that, despite an almost superhuman ability to dodge genuine success, Therapy? are a sure bet to produce a good record. Even at their most disappointing (“Shameless” we’re looking at you) these Northern Irish noiseniks have an uncanny knack of putting together enough great songs to make an enjoyable album…and it’s not as if they haven’t taken plenty of risks along the way as well. This is a band that, when poised to get big on the back of the angst-ridden “Troublegum”, veered suddenly to left-field territory with the claustrophobia of “Infernal Love” and “Semi-Detached”, yet they survived and became all the stronger for it. Now Therapy? have seemingly have given up all hope of being as huge as they deserve, but that doesn’t mean that new opus “A Brief Crack of Light” is a lazy effort by any stretch of the imagination.
Fuelled by much of the fist-pounding energy that made 2009’s “Crooked Timber” arguably their finest work to date, opener “Living in the Shadow of a Terrible Thing” may be almost worryingly predictable but it serves as the perfect bridge between their last record and this. As the album progresses the band often threaten to leave the beaten track entirely and abandon the listener in their myriad of influences, but then another rock solid anthem turns up and brings everyone back down to earth once more. The strongest moments are, as ever, the ones that mix the band’s classic songwriting style with more bizarre diversions. “Get Your Dead Hand Off My Shoulder” is like noise rock-Kraftwerk style and “Plague Bell” is like Mastodon if they focused more of their attention on being extremely sinister.
With so many varying influences it is unsurprising that the band do occasionally make the odd slight misstep. In much the same way as the mammoth “Magic Mountain” felt out of place for its post-rock influences on “Crooked Timber”, so here does “Marlow” (Maybeshewill duelling with selected backing vocalists The Sugarcubes). At times this feels like a collection of songs thrown together rather than a genuinely cohesive full-length record. For a fourteenth studio album though it is truly astonishing. Andrew Cairns is still a brilliantly engaging vocalist and guitarist while Michael McKeegan and Neil Cooper continually prove themselves as one of the most hypnotic rhythm sections on the planet. Coyly experimental yet still capable of being insanely catchy, “A Brief Crack of Light” is not perfect…but compared to 95% of the records that are likely to be released in 2012, it frankly may as well be considered so.
“A Brief Crack of Light” is out now via Blast Records. Therapy? tour the UK with Skindred on the Jagermeister Music Tour from April 10th to April 14th.
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