From the offset of their career, The Battery Farm have launched aural assaults to elucidate the filth that lies in the stitches of our Tory sleaze-slicked social tapestry. Their most recent single, House of Pain, is no exception as it brings forth a new brand of furore while leaving the snarky antagonism by the wayside to deliver a necessitated depiction of the brutality endured by the working classes.
The protestive volition within the vocal delivery couldn’t make it clearer that the last straw has been drawn in response to the indignity of modern survival; it finds a feral way of communicating that shame shouldn’t be carried by the people doing what they need to get by; it should rot the souls of the late-stage capitalists forcing the masses into degrading subjugation.
With thrash punk drum fills hammering the discontent into House of Pain and Dominic Corry’s guitars carrying their signature kaleidoscopic with industrial dissonance effects to visualise the foreboding and unforgiving climate, the visceralism within the stark reflection of post-Brexit reality couldn’t be more affectingly astute.
If you needed any more convincing that the Manchester-based gutter punks have moved into their Motorhead era, the B-side single, Time of Peace, should suffice. The exposition of living in a time of perpetual crisis is all the more impactful with the atrocities of the conflict in Gaza playing out before our powerless eyes as even the Labour party leader condones the international war crimes.
Stream House of Pain on Spotify or watch the official music video on YouTube.
‘A Working Class Lad’ is the first single to timely ooze from The Battery Farm’s forthcoming debut album FLIES. I say timely; it was the first song I listened to after hearing that Rishi Sunak had been sneaking money out of the budgets of deprived areas in the UK. We should all be PISSED. How pissed? Try matching the Manchester punk raconteurs of volition; there’s no one else on my radar that would make a better soundtrack for the overdue UK revolution.
Of all lyrical concepts, one that allows you to voyeur the conflict between identity, shame, confusion and class has to be one of the hardest to get right. There’s almost nothing more uncomfortable to me than the dissonance in celebrating the exploitation of our labour. Thankfully, The Battery Farm is about 100 IQ points above scribbling about working-class pride and becoming just another piece in the propagandist machine.
While the broiled and gnarled punk instrumentals and Ben Corry’s signature non-lexical rally cries bring the vexed energy, the simplicity of the lyrics triggers your oppressed contempt. I’m assuming everyone with a sense of sentience and a working-class status will have some; if not, I want the details of your lobotomist.
A Working Class Lad is out on all streaming platforms and a limited edition cassette on Rare Vitamin Records. The debut album FLIES is out on all platforms on Rare Vitamin Records on 18th November.
If Rob Zombie dreamt up a band to feature in his horror flicks, I am pretty sure there would be a fair amount of hypothetical reminiscence to the mischievously intellectual Manchester-based outfit, The Battery Farm, who are set to release their second boundary-breaking EP Dirty Den’s March of Suffering.
The addictively dynamic release permits you to feel pretty much every emotion on the human spectrum. Given that slipping out of ennui enough to get excited by new music isn’t exactly an easy feat when our worldviews become even bleaker with every log onto social media and flick onto the news, that speaks volumes.
Beyond the sheer sonic innovation, the genius in The Battery Farm lies in their ability to appeal to the melancholically inclined with their satirically liberating tracks that make having an IQ higher than a loaf of bread fleetingly worth it.
Their exposition on the dankness of the human condition in Dirty Den’s March of Suffering cuts just as close to the bone as The Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible. The parallels with the Manics don’t end there either; notably, they carry the same scathingly sharp lyrical wit as Edwards.
After an ominously distorted Westworld-style honkytonk prelude that disquietly teases the carnage that follows, the EP volleys you into the tumultuous ride with When the Whip Goes Crack which pulls pure veracious poetry out of squalor and indignity. If you thought Ken Loach’s films were hard-hitting, prepare for the bruises imparted by this juggernaut of an alt-rock release that lends from everything from post-hardcore to grunge.
I’ve Never Been to Gorton proves that The Battery Farm can do light-hearted just as well as they can lay down inflamed perception-shifting introspection. Behind the bouncy vocals is an exhibition of the modestly virtuosic talent of guitarist, Dominic Corry. While you get cheap kicks of hearing about the landscapes that you have lamented about being around, you are left mesmerised by the guitar licks that stylistically sit between Marr and Glen Branca.
The Battery Farm may have been lazily lumped into the generic punk category for their previous releases, but they come out all experimental guns blazing with Drowning in Black. The darkly psychedelic release is easily one of the most authentically experimental soundscapes conceived in Manchester in the last two decades.
Roy Keane isn’t Real is a bruiser of a scuzzed-up attack on the stupidity and conspiracy theories that have been sending everyone under recently. If any single proves their commitment to delving deep into their Machiavellian imagination, it’s this punk-rooted track grounded in their working-class charisma.
The concluding single, We’re at the Top, ends the EP on an ethereal, jarringly stunning note. It fittingly becomes the swan song of the EP that encompasses life, death and everything between with infinitely more cerebral finesse than Good Charlotte mustered in The Chronicles of Life and Death. With a similar sonic palette to Jerry & the Peacemakers and vocal reminiscence to Mike Patton’s crooning on Mr Bungle’s California album, it arrests you into reflection while conceptually imparting the disarming assurance that our mortal coil is ephemeral. Ingeniously, We’re at the Top tempts you away from spending your days fixated on the ugliness in the world with the same ‘we’re all going to die so fucking be nice’ gravitas as In Heaven by Pixies.
In their own words, here is the concept behind the Dirty Den’s March of Suffering:
“This EP is an attempt by us to celebrate the humanity behind the moment of death. It’s a celebration of the foibles and fallibility of people, a speculation on the silly and mundane things we may get caught up in in death as we do in life – trips to Gorton never made, conspiracy theories chased forever, all kinds of irrelevant nonsense. It’s an acknowledgement too of the blitzkrieg of fear that must be the moment of death, regardless of how it comes, and the ultimate loneliness that is the destiny of all of us. Regardless of circumstance, death is the most innately lonely thing of all and as such it is innately terrifying. The EP is also a futile attempt to understand how something so gigantic can be so unknowable. None of us know what it is like to die, and just as your humble working boiz are doing here, we can all only speculate.”
The EP is due for release on October 15th, 2021; it will be available to stream and purchase on all major platforms. Physical copies are available for via their website.
Tickets for the EP launch at Gulliver’s in Manchester on October 16th are available here.
