Frankie and the Witch Fingers
Trash Classic
The Reverberation Appreciation Society/Greenway Records
Utter chaos greets curious dumpster divers eager to surf through Trash Classic and get hooked on its frenzied, dirty, art-punk energy. Raised, angry voices, swerving cars and vaudevillian chase music set a scene of high anxiety, the wild cacophony growing louder as it introduces “Channel Rot,” a bang-bang instrumental blast of edgy menace. Frankie and The Witch Fingers are about to explode.
What comes next is a savage, all-out war on conformity and comfort, running pell-mell across ruins of urban blight and madly laughing off manic episodes of hedonistic nihilism. Their visceral garage-rock riots of furious, angular guitars, unhinged vocals, and jagged, roiling rhythms slashed to ribbons by excitable, homicidal synths, Frankie and The Witch Fingers — always in a state of metamorphosis, speeding and switching lanes like crazed getaway drivers — hang onto King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard’s psychedelic carpet ride for dear life and kick down doors with the brute force of Rocket from the Crypt.
Seek and destroy, but do it with a smile, is their mission, and they’ve given a whole new positive meaning to the term “hot garbage,” as super-charged dynamos like “Dead Silence” — fried computer circuitry and all, pushing The Hives up against the wall and mugging them for their riffs — and the gleefully dynamic and infectious “Fucksake” blister and burn. Trading call-and-response outbursts, the latter is a male-female duet from hell, harnessing the snotty potency and vivaciousness of Amyl and The Sniffers, only they’re working with a broader, more insatiable palette, vandalizing their wall of sound with spray paint and spit.
Anarchic electro-clash never sounded as overwhelmingly catchy as it does on “Economy” and “Eggs Laid Brain,” these dizzying, careening, Gang of Four-type workouts that shake some feral action. And “Out of the Flesh” doesn’t take a breather, driving recklessly on mean, snaking grooves, bashed drums, and vertiginous, squiggly, shooting star keyboards, with an even faster “Total Reset” forging ahead in ecstatic, relentless fashion.
Just when it seems they can’t possibly up the ante, Frankie and The Witch Finger do just that every single time. Trash Classic lives up to its name.
