Album title:
Yes! Tinnitus!
Artist:
Shooting at Unarmed Men
Label:
Too Pure
Given my affection for Jon Chapple's former band, Mclusky, I find it a painful task to convey just how bad this album is. On 'Yes! Tinnitus!' we find Chapple and his crew lazily affecting the stylistic tics that made Mclusky so compelling – the psychotic vocals, lo-fi production and off-kilter arrangements are all present and correct – but the band are so obviously just going through the motions that it's no surprise that Chapple has since put the band on hiatus and headed for Australia. The riffs are saggy and characterless, the lyrics dull as dishwater and the drumming is quite monumentally pathetic. On recent single Girls Music (sic) Chapple even has a stab at a Pixies pastiche to hold our interest, but the only emotion evoked here is pity. The overall impression is something akin to a punk rock 'Weekend at Bernie's', only this corpse is too badly decomposed to be fooling anybody. Alas. [Jay Shukla]