Any dolt can turn things up to 11. Forget your plugs at a Big Joan gig and you will get the morning after ring, but you will also see a band who’ll only cave your eardrum in at exactly the right moment, and only as part of a visceral mangling of the rock format, having turned it more nasty, sexy and raw than most other dullards. One of Bristol’s best noisemakers, they also have, in Annette Berlin, something of a trump card, if pictures on trump cards show great singers: her Teutonic tones range from fiery ranting to kittenish evil to cool cruelty. She’s the Euro auteur element added to the band’s film noir rumble, which plays with space, texture and volume, yielding a lot through bass prowl, synth creep and psychotic guitar. ‘The Long, Slow Death Of…’ is the second Big Joan album and sounds lush, Berlin-via-Bristol’s Anton Maiovvi’s mix job creating a brilliantly sleek cloud of dense and ever present danger.

Opener ‘(They Call Him) Johnny’ is terrific, an echoed-up Berlin jabbering imperiously over a crotchety, ready to crack backing. The twin points when the guitar crashes in on a sick screech of feedback are so good you want to gulp them down forever. The album’s chocka with stuff like this, of songs that edge in on tick tock bass and drums then grow fat on simple, gory guitar lines. Taken down a notch, you have the great ‘Funeral’, where a lonely keyboard pulses like a broken fluoro tube before waves of static ooze from the speakers like mouth breathing ghosts. But back up the scale you get ‘888’, where whipsmart guitar, nonsense vocal babble and Mclusky bass rise together in concentrated bursts of pyrotechnics, or ‘Show’, which is totally A-grade: ringmaster vox giving way to extended, madly overdubbed guitar joy before rejoining the crazed fray for more derangement, barking out “you’re just a fucking clown” at the death. It’s a thrill. And you can do a zombie death dance to closing belter ‘Bin1’, a percussive, Pig Bag-style instrumental with a stormtrooper guitar line and their onstage trashcan whacked from all angles. ‘The Long, Slow Death Of…’ steamrollers you with brilliance. Get down and stay down.

http://bigjoan.bandcamp.com/album/the-long-slow-death-of-big-joan

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