When I was a child I had but two records: ‘Postman Pat’ and ‘Jeff Waynes’  musical version of the War of the Worlds’.

I listened to these vastly different recordings many times over, with the kind of devotion that I could never muster now, not even for Immortal.  With each repetition the MOR prog stylings and cartoon theme music embedded themselves deeply within my young psyche; an audio bot fly larvae that would much later metamorphose and eat its way back out. However these juvenile discs would transmogrify not into insects but into peculiar attitudes that now do their best to cause little but grief.

So as I sit here listening to Colin for the umpteenth time please account for the reality here: if you dig through the cephalic mud of this reviewer’s opinion garden, you come to a bedrock full of cat and Martian fossils.

PUS are from the Valleys. This means they break one of the fundamental rules of bands in South Wales: “There are three kinds of bands: good bands, bad bands and Valleys’ bands”. They break this by refusing to be a 2nd rate Metallica covers group (who have progressed to playing originals. Originals that sound exactly like Metallica songs) and focusing on producing very crusty doom. Very crusty doom of the fantastic variety: huge churning riffs push the other elements out of the way, subverting drum and vocal beneath a ghastly cheap-amped shroud of bleak chords.

Now it has to be noted that Colin is crudely recorded; which is exactly what PUS want. They did the whole thing on a tape recorder using but one pass per song, there is no editing or production here, it is a document of a loud and nasty band in some cruddy cheap space distorting the fabric of spacetime using only the electric guitar. The oversaturated nature of the recording adds another delectable layer of fuzz that fills in for the tinnitus you’d be developing if you were present at the session, even played loudly through a decent hi-fi it sounds as if it’s far, far away. Somehow you are not permitted to fully hear or comprehend PUS, a racket which actively denies quality.

Which reminds me of sometime in the late 1980’s, during the airing schedule of the BBC series ‘Tripods’. My family watched this show dutifully and when this particular episode finished my father produced from his person the full-colour insert book that accompanied Jeff Wayne’s aforementioned WOW album. What delight! Look kids, tripods! He’d exclaim as my brother and I poured over the awesome paintings of crows tearing what we assumed was alien flesh from the crown of a wicked tripod (turns out it was the red weed – we didn’t bother actually listening to the music until later) and we were transfixed by the images contained therein. But at some point this ceased to be enough for us – I’m not sure why because the artwork certainly didn’t stop having page after page of towering mecha obliterating puny Victorian buildings – and bit by bit the book lost its lustre until one fateful moment when my brother and I decided that what would make these tired tableaux timelessly tantalising (sorry) again would be MORE TRIPODS so we set about adding our own to the mix, using nothing but crayola (or whatever cheapo crayons you could get in Kingswood) and youthful aplomb. Very shortly there were a great deal of  blue-outlined spidery things looming hundreds of miles over London – drawn so large because 6 year olds cannot fully appreciate perspective. You can imagine the fuss my parents made when they found the offence but you’d be wrong – nothing was made of it and the insert went back into the record concurrently back into the cabinet beneath the hi-fi and was not mentioned again. Now THAT is a strange experience for a kid… is it OK to destroy that which is boring? Or do our artistic efforts merit naught? Perhaps my father – as old then as I am now – had come to the eventual discovery that notions of quality are meaningless judgements foist upon the world by those who would seek to control something?

Or maybe they got it for cheap from one of my various dodgy uncles so it didn’t really matter, the point is that anyone who tells you Colin sucks because it sounds so shit is wrong on two fundamental levels: Firstly it doesn’t suck from it’s shite sounds: it RULES from it. Secondly they are wrong because their parent’s copy of WOW bore no unique mark to remind everyone of times past (both happy and sad), and thus aquired no special value as an item all of its own and  was probably tossed out when everyone bought a CD player so they could listen to Brothers In Arms. And that would be a dire shame because that Phil Lynott track is killer.

I’ve done such a good job selling this crap you’d better quickly hit them up at their MYSPACE and beg the goat for a copy.

P.S. the fate of my Postman Pat album, although harsh, was different: my Father lent it to mate of his – who then left it in the back of his car on a particularly sunny day. The vinyl melted and even though it was replaced it was never MY copy again. I’ll try to shoehorn that analogy for loss into another review sometime, promise.