Album Review: The Paranoyds – Carnage Bargain

If you ever had a dream about being trapped in the oddly futuristic past of the original Batman TV series, this debut album from LA’s The Paranoyds would be the soundtrack. Everything about this album, from the two-note guitar siren opening of Face First onwards, is compellingly unsettling. It swerves and flits past, smacking you on the ear as it goes by. And then laughs sweetly.

This album is constructed from such an eclectic palette of sounds, it’s impossible to classify it. Girlfriend Degree twists the Pistols’ Submission riff (or is it All Day And All Of The Night?), and then it’s off to the B-52s via some decidedly Dave Greenfield-esque organ work. And then again it’s Wire’s Pink Flag but with lipstick, or The Ramones with a twiddly 1960s space synth. See the problem? But it’s not a problem, because the end result is just utterly, utterly charming. Quite mad, but charming.

Strip away all of the unsettling quirkiness and what you have left is clever and infectious garage punk that draws upon the known references of the musical past and contorts them into something very contemporary. Couple this with a lyrical intensity that focuses on – yes – the paranoia inherent in living in a modern era where everything is reduced to headlines and soundbites and you end up with a very potent stew. Potent yet kind of dreamy: yet another paradox.

This is a supremely confident and affirming debut from a band who clearly have no intention of doing anything other than what pleases them. Fortunately for them, their wilful angularity and deliberately subversive musical vision does not render them anything other than very appealing. The musical equivalent of Spongebob Squarepants: vivid, beyond comprehension and utterly absorbing. Play and repeat until you get it.

Carnage Bargain is out now on Suicide Squeeze Records.