"ALBUM OF THE WEEK
HEY COLOSSUS – Happy Birthday (Riot Season) - One great big beautiful shit-storm of glorious noise and feedback-drenched wholesomely good goodness. Violence can be a wonderful thing and this is as raw and abrasive as the London band have ever been, total overkill. Now if Motörhead were to make a new album that sounded anything like this then everything would be perfect with the world. Like we said last time, Hey Colossus long since blew way past their intended aim of just making something that sounded somewhere like a place where Fudge Tunnel meet Can - compared to this, that place would be a paradise of mellow peace and ambient relaxation. This is the pure art of violent noise, corrosive hate-filled hardcore and hardboiled resonance, this is a serious heavy metal challenge, can you take it? Think a bleak and black Hawkwind in a cement mixer churning up enough sludge to crush all and then double it and add some more. This is like that time Psychic TV set out with the deliberate intention of driving the entire audience out of the Wardour Street Marquee and almost succeeded – this is a beautiful shit-storm of glorious noise. And in there somewhere under the rust and the jagged bits there’s a primal sophistication waiting to be harvested, it wouldn’t work if the art wasn’t clever, if they weren’t in some kind of structured control, if they weren’t such good musicians. This is clearly an album that you’ll never ever get bored with - static violence, piercing delights and clever art waiting underneath all the multiple layers of fuzz guitars that fuse together to sound like a badly recorded Inner City Unit bootleg where some weird wired tribe has taken over half the stage and set fire to the PA – brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Only way to feel the noise is when it’s good and loud, so good you can’t believe it, screaming with the crowd, don’t sweat it, get it back to you. Ah yes, this is indeed the full-on shit - shake your head, you must be dead if it don’t make you fly!"