VR Sex – Hard Copy (Dias) – VR Sex, the acid punk alias of Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty who dons the moniker Noel Skum for this project, have been feeding us tasty morsels of their new album for weeks now, we just got our grubby paint encrusted hands on the whole thing. Time to unpack it all and like we already said, this is jagged, edgy, this is edged, urgent, we said that of the first track they released, Real Doll Time, but we could have been talking about the whole album. Real Doll Time was a fine first taste and as we asked at the time, is a touch like if she had only had stopped making that hissing noise? Does some of this sound a little bit cardiac arresting? Neat tune, and yes, a neat album, neat neat neat. Do like the way the songs develop when you kind of think they’re done with it all, love the urgency, the forward motion, the rush of it all, they’re speeding.
There’s loads in here, Hard Copy is an album laced with all the right flavours and all without it ever obviously tasting of anything you can easily put finger on – bits of new wave era Hawkwind (that late 70’s Calvert menace and that hey ma take a look at yer boy up on that stage with his latest toy – bits of Gun Club, those early Roxy influenced bands, lots of Chrome, early Cardiacs (or maybe more Panixphere?) a touch Killing Joke (way more stripped down than the Joke though) and all without ever sounding anything like any of them or any of the many early 80’s new wave post punk bands they never obviously taste of but somehow do. Hard Copy is going down rather well here
Some details for you – “Following 2022’s Rough Dimension LP, Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty – made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR Sex into a fully collaborative five-piece band. Hard Copy is the result – ten tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales and is due out March 22nd via Dais Records.
To christen the new group’s camaraderie of becoming a five-piece band, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments.
Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel – an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground – the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud-quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.”
Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”
What we actually have here is a really really good album, a timeless album that tastes as much of now as it tastes of then. Yes power pop, yes post punk, punked up new wave colour, menace, at times brooding, shadowy, nailed down and all just right, they have the sound pegged perfectly without ever being a clone. Right now the’re sounding rather like the early days of the The Church (that is a compliment), most of it sounds faster than any Blurred Crusade and yes, it does sound dirty, it does put the horse before the cart, they do have an obvious identity, it is a toy world, they do sound like they’re speeding, they sound like they;re from under the Westway somewhere around 1978, they sound like now, that guitar sounds brilliant, you know how we are around here, we only have time for the very best things, love it, love every dirty filthy little bit of it…
Release date: Friday, March 22nd 2024
t
THE ORGAN 