Continuing their run of good taste, Trouble in Mind Records are now offering up the fiery new one from Cincinnati's The Serfs. Half Eaten by Dogs is a throwback jam, a ferocious blast of electro-punk. And the players here -- Dylan McCartney (vocals, percussion, guitar, bass, electronics), Dakota Carlyle (electronics, bass, guitar, vocals) and Andie Luman (vocals, synths) -- are up to no good at all. I love it!
The buzzing "Order Imposing Sentence" kicks things off, but it's the pulsing "Cheap Chrome" that really made me love this band. Like other tracks on the record, there's a nod in the direction of both Fad Gadget and Suicide, but things are decidedly rougher here. This is ruthless stuff, with a lot of bad attitude. "Suspension Bridge Collapse" takes things further back, with a hint of Throbbing Gristle in not only the song's unsavory title, but in it's sound. As vocals echo up from the void, and keyboards gurgle and pop, we are in the arena of the unwell. If The Serfs are merely trying on styles here, nodding to the past to gain cred now, I really don't care as this stuff hits in exactly the right way.
While "Beat Me Down" suggests a debt owed to dub -- is that a melodica I hear? -- the majority of Half Eaten by Dogs bristles and churns with a real New Wave before it got cute-edge. Brashly nasty and clearly not intent on winning over a bunch of fans with easy hooks, this material is full of references to the sort of really challenging material I grew up on. And The Serfs largely succeed at claiming this style as their own, imbuing all of this -- even the "mellower" songs -- with a real sense of unease. I can hear what's in their record collection, yeah, but there's enough original here to suggest that there's enough juice in the Serfs engine for the whole thing to keep going for a long time.
Half Eaten by Dogs by The Serfs is out on Trouble in Mind this week.
[Photo: Liese Stiebritz]