KRETCH  'DOWNFALL'

REVIEWS

 

Live Tote Review

'By the time Kretch come on, I'm convinced I'm Charles Bukowski, having just stumbled into Jeffro from SixFtHick and told him that he could take a shit on stage and I'd still think it was the best gig I'd ever seen. Go figure. Luckily, Kretch are fucking awesome-the lead singer looks like the bastard child of Peter Garret, Ron Peno and Jello Biaffra, and the band sounds like The Sex Pistols if they had been good, The Dead Kennedys who were always good and The Jesus Lizard who could plunge small African nations into famine and still be good.'

Johnny Gash

 

Beat Magazine

Elvis Costello once asked the question: what's so wrong with peace, love and understanding? Well, that might be true, but the punk in Declan McManus would realize that anger and a sizeable slab of good ol' fashioned nihilism makes a fuck of a better rock 'n' roll record than a bunch of moaning folkies sitting around a dwindling campfire with a pissy melodies and trite lyrics about a world peace.

Case in point - Downfall, the new album from Spooky Record's latest signing, Kretch. Kretch presumably has a genuine meaning (and one that might be traced to the band's Yugoslavian origins), but it sounds like the sound you'd make when you realized every last piece of shit that could go down around you, had in escapable mind-fucking fact, actually gone down. It'd be at that point that you'd either go postal, or pick up a guitar and write a song like Downfall, replete guitars that burn your senses like a red hot iron stabbed into the side of your face, warbling vocals reminiscent of a man condemned for the sins of humanity and a beat so precise it gives rhythmic life to the order that lies within chaos.

Or maybe you'd reflect on a dysfunctional booze-and-coke relationship gone horribly wrong with a track like Second Opinion, champion the devil-may-give a shit rock 'n' roll lifestyle in Four Fingers or lament the moment of love for the pain its absence brings in 100 Years.

Then you might embrace the seedy underside of punked out blues in Hi Fi Blues to reflect on your regrettable loss of control or even skirt round like the edges of Parisian romance in C'est Vrai in a vain of hope at finding something, anything to cherish. Or why not take some of the finest grinding rock chords heard since Bay Area in 1979 and celebrate a brief moment of emotional bonding of Inside You, take a simple but dangerously groin thrusting riff in OD to narrate a young life destroyed by drug use, or take a linear narrative and smash it to buggery with the pounding guttural chordage of Broken English Rock 'n' Roll. And by the time you've laid your world bare in Feelings, you've still got time to spit in the face of the nay-sayers in Ignorance, and describe a world where your history defines your fate.

Life isn't bad for everyone as it may have been for Kretch-there's some shit going on here. But for everyone who's pissed off, fucked up, chewed up, spat out and stomped into the gravel of existence, Downfall is for you. Listen, weep and enjoy the moment.

-Patrick Emery