For a Bristol band on a retro trip to sixties San Francisco, The Bad Joke That Ended Well manage to sound pretty darn fresh on their self titled album. That, methinks, has a lot to do with the sheer energy that this band has injected into their music.
Alex Studer growls like a man possessed by a whiskey soaked version of Roky Erickson while that proper analogue style organ drives most every song like it was on a heady concoction of drugs (and I don’t mean paracetamol either). Guitars pop by randomly just to make a fuzz of themselves and there’s even a touch of Americana hiding in there even if the banjo gets kidnapped and forced to smoke crack before you can go walking down that dusty road in dungarees.
The banging choon –in the language of the street – of this short album has to be the deeply moody “Dance Of The Dead”. It’s got more reverb than a song should have and that, in an animal sacrifice kind of way, is just how it should be.
It is truly a holy beer drinking thing that they do.