We shared the four tracks from the Long Arms Stomping EP with our good friend Grant Pringle. He is a musician, artist, live VSB drummer and long time supporter of our work. This is what he had to say about our first new music in ten years.
"Vacuum Spasm Babies explain life like Mark E Smith explains life. Decades of weary reflection envelop the songs, inform the deadpan delivery and capture both the disappointment of the mundane and the jagged thrill of life’s unexpected glimmers. Like the stark beauty of monumental 2-finger keyboard melodies. There are no frills.
Vacuum Spasm Babies don’t do frills. You should be grateful: streamlined, gnarly chunks of insistent, arcade game synth, throbbing factory noise and musings on the misery of modern life both real and imagined. 'Skin crawls, clad in bandages. All that sorrow.'
Make no mistake, these are beautiful ugly songs. Take 'Shoes Floating In The Reservoir'. Settling into the intro feels like trying to walk off a hangover in the drizzle. A dank fug clings to the skeleton melody and one thing is immediately clear: all is not well. 'He makes her laugh with a trick with a coin' tips us into a tale of trust and regret, detail glimpsed in slashes of light through dank branches and deep water reflections. By the time he 'takes off her shoes as a bird pecks a rabbit’s eyes', we may as well succumb to the grimm inevitability and focus instead on that damned hangover. 'Oh No' indeed.
Compare and contrast this to 'Long Arms Stomping' that sputters, stops and starts like an unloved chainsaw before screaming into vivid, clattering battle - a carpark punch-up between Jon Spencer and ? and the Mysterians. 'Songs of bad intent bring creatures from the forest, with sticks and knives and chains and guns'. Indeed.
A new vacuum Spasm Babies offering is a special thing. In a world gone to shit, all is not lost. 'The castle up ahead is not mine but it will be by tonight'.
