THE ST PIERRE SNAKE INVASION / CASSELS | LIVE REVIEW
Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Wed 2 Oct
Cassels are a band who like to live dangerously – whether that’s by gorging themselves immediately before a show (drummer Loz’s 15-inch pizza is sitting OK, apparently, whereas guitarist/vocalist Jim admits to burping up some pre-gig aubergine burger earlier in the tour) or by routinely taking a chainsaw to hardcore, art-punk and emo and stitching together the pieces with scant regard for concealing the seams. The chop‘n’change style is dizzying and discomforting, the songs hushed one minute and raging the next.
It’s not just Cassels who are living dangerously, though – it’s all of us. Tracks like A Queue At The Chemist’s on the brothers’ new LP The Perfect Ending are a scathing assessment of our collective apathy in the face of environmental apocalypse – the fact that we’re fiddling with our iPhones while Rome burns. For Jim, there’s little solace to be found in intimate relationships with others – Mink Skin Coat is about “how I still think my girlfriend hates me even after five years of happy monogamy”, and storming set-closer Hating Is Easy pinpoints the way that love leaves you vulnerable and exposed. The only real consolation, The Perfect Ending suggests with a sickly grin, is that the world will be a better place without us.
Tourmates The St Pierre Snake Invasion also like laughing in the dark. Braindead tackles the current clusterfuck that is British politics, frontman Damien Sayell admitting he finds the uber-omnishambles “fucking hilarious”. The band call Bristol home – Jesus, Mary & Joseph Talbot is named in tribute to the vocalist of their peers Idles – but Sayell actually hails from Merthyr. This is as close as he dares to come, “except for funerals and 90th birthday parties”, and he recalls experiencing a musical awakening a short walk away at Cardiff Arms Park, when Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Thunder and Crown Of Thorns rocked his eight-year-old world. Now he and his band are doing the awakening – probably of city-centre residents within a two-mile radius.
At first, their brick-to-the-face hardcore seems one-dimensional in comparison with Cassels, but I Am The Lonely Tourist and the strategic deployment of a reverb pedal and a melodica modulates and varies the attack, while Carroll A. Deering is a spectacular car crash featuring a sample from the Llanelli Male Voice Choir. Both of those tracks star on latest album Caprice Enchanté, which has just sold out despite them having no label, but it’s the older Rock ‘N’ Roll Workshops – introduced as “the worst song of the set” – that best underlines their love of McLusky’s sardonic noise-rock.
Although there’s no encore – they might be on tour, but Sayell has work at nine in the morning – the frontman will be back at this venue in December to play two dates with his reformed heroes. McLusky, that is, not Bon Jovi.
words and photos BEN WOOLHEAD