Feedback

The howl of the ampstack, the thump of stick on skin, the clink of pint-glass. The simple pleasures and vices endure, even as time warps and future dystopias loom large. Yet fresh horizons beckon even with the most trustworthy ingredients, and Thee Alcoholics are here to hammer the point home. Feedback, the debut from this London-based outfit is where riffage, rancour and revelation do battle, a bleary-eyed treatise from the edge of sanity with a life-affirming afterglow.

Thee Alcoholics are the brainchild of Rhys Llewellyn, a longtime Rocket alumnus whose background leans as heavily into the bassbin-shaking realms of electronic music as it does the tinnitus-inducing world of the cranked amp. Not content with hammering drumskins for numerous floor-shaking records on the Rocket discography from the likes of Hey Colossus and The Notorious Hi-Fi Killers, he’s also been responsible for brain-rearranging electronic works under the Drmcnt and Acidliner monikers. Thee Alcoholics, however - which initially gestated as a result of Rhys himself wanting to pursue the somewhat hostile sound in his own head during lockdown - maps out a collision course between all of the above.

“I wanted to capture something visceral and more intense and essentially make music that I loved and missed playing. I was doing a lot of home recording while lockdown was happening and going in my local studio in Peckham on my own just trying to get ideas out and record stuff to take home and carve in to something while stuck in the house” From this, Thee Alcoholics’ name arrived from the ether (“a gnarly name for a gnarly sound” Rhys reflects) and soon the ensuing racket was captured on two cassette releases for Wrong Speed Records. Ultimately, this path has led to various incarnations of a bruising live band, and hence to Feedback, where all the malice, indignation and inspiration of the decade so far coalesced into a brain-frying salvo of ornery catharsis.

Cranky and cantankerous yet lysergically aligned, Feedback is mesmeric rock with swagger, warped into sci-fi shapes by the spirit and sonics of bass and soundsystem culture. The psychedelic shapes here are redolent of the ur-klang of The Fall and the monolithic lurch of The Heads, the motorik malevolence less an uplifting trip to the heavens than a drill down to the earth’s core.

Discernible in these jackhammer beats, grimly murmured vocals and delirious dirges to certain heads may be the trash futurism of Chrome, the decomposed stomp of unsung legends Earl Brutus and the electro-punk attack of Six Finger Satellite, yet all of the above co-ordinates are waylaid effortlessly by a balls-out intensity and a fearsome intent on aural oblivion at all costs.

Feedback may be elemental and primal, yet this is no psych comfort-blanket nor retro-fetishism, rather a repetition-driven journey headlong into intimidating territory unknown. Get on board, and strap yourselves in for a bumpy ride.