You could argue that, semantically speaking, everything since about 1978 has been post-punk music, if you were that sort of pedantic and unnecessarily argumentative person. Thankfully, I’m not, but it gives you something to think about and makes for a neat way to get me into the process of writing the review.
Of course, things don’t work like that, but what we find on consumables debut ep, bland is the logical extension of that sound, that scene, that style. It is also everything that the self-depricating title suggests. They capture the same raw energy, the same punk-infused power, the same caustic sonic belligerence, the same attitude, and the same alternative moves and angular grooves that those early 1980s pioneers channelled, but, cleverly, this never feels like a band merely plundering the past for ideas and inspiration.
And if songs like opener, “panacea” growl and grate, scream and squall in a way that is similar to the likes of The Fall, then “conman” demonstrates that it is too the future that the band is looking, taking merely the essence of what has gone before, wrapping it up in their own musical personality and flinging it into the potential of a bright and battered, promising and punishing new future.
Then you have songs such as “is it enough” which, to me at least, sound the way punk should have sounded if it had concentrated on having a constructive future and stopped looking at itself in the mirror long enough.
This is the sound of 1981, if 1981 were happening now. It’s the sound of what might have been, the sound of the sonic foot being pushed down an alternative trouser leg of time. It’s the what if and the why not, and it is happening right before your modern eyes, I mean ears.
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