Yeah, we get it. You picked up the Coneheads record and the Uranium Club discography and you love telling people how much you’ve fallen for these weird little bands. Got news for you though, dude – great though they evidently are, it’s time you realised how thoroughly un-weird your favourite bands truly are. Let’s take a journey into the world of The Mind.
You’d probably classify this as ‘post-punk’, if only because that’s the only bracket into which they (very loosely) fit. Basslines pulse robotically while guitars splutter discordantly across sheets of static and electronic drums; like dub music shorn of its Caribbean groove and reinvented by retro-futuristic robots, hellbent on kicking out some brain-busting skronk while they wait for Skynet to take over.
Opener ‘Blah Bla Nothin’ weighs in like Pere Ubu staring at the chasm between ‘Dub Housing’ and ‘Lady From Shanghai’ before drowning in hiss, and ‘Enjoy Your Fantasy’ is the soundtrack to This Mortal Coil’s nightmares, powered by the distant sound of rolling drums and a fuzzy tension that bristles the hairs on the back of your neck while leaving you thoroughly unsettled. Elsewhere studio trickery and a dystopian sci-fi gloom hang over the whole thing like dust on a lampshade - basically it’s all over the place. And in case you hadn’t guessed, YES, ‘Edge of the Planet’ is all the better for it.
Exactly how The Mind came together is a mystery for other people to figure out; it’s enough to know that members of Pleasure Leftists, Homostupids and other bands somehow concocted these creeped-out masterpieces of thrilling discomfort. They’re as idiosyncratic and thoroughly in tune with their own voice as the early days of Throwing Muses; throwing their glorious chaos at the wall and allowing its own order to settle. Buy a copy, dummy – make weird your new normal.
https://drunkensailorrecords.bandcamp.com/album/edge-of-the-planet-lp
