PLAY DEAD - Mug Cake EP Review
From the humorous attempts to get a decent haircut on ‘Barbershop’ to the nihilistic-rage-against-boredom ‘Offy’ - Mug Cake is certainly an EP not to be missed.
The brilliant second EP from punk rockers PLAY DEAD, Mug Cake, is the EP equivalent of meeting at your mate's flat on a Friday night after a week of hell — offy plastic bag in hand, you ring the bell, crack a can as you wait. The door opens — music and the smell of weed smack you in the face; suddenly, everything feels a little better — the night is young, and so are you.
The EP starts with the kick-you-in-the-face urgency of “Away From Here” — a song that musically as much as lyrically embodies the anger of relationships gone wrong and alienation that follows. The thrashing guitar of Joe Blair accompanies his angry vocal, and Ollie Clark’s thumping telephone-wire-basslines provide the spine that is pulverised by Elias Brewin’s heavy metal drumming.
The trio don’t linger in this mood for long. The second track, “Barbershop”, highlights Blair’s knack for taking a seemingly mundane activity and finding hidden anxieties. It’s a hilarious punk attack on Blair’s sleepy barber and the dire consequences of getting a fucking shit haircut — if this isn’t your worst nightmare, well done, you’re better than me.
In true punk fashion, the song “Company Car” sees the band skewering the city-banker-yuppie-fucks. The kind of person the band says is “always putting himself before anyone else, probably has
too much money for his own good but still isn’t very happy with his life.” We need more of this in new music — banker’s bonus caps, anyone? Like seriously, it’s fucked up — this bonus culture has been partially held responsible for promoting short-term thinking and excessive risk in the years preceding the financial crisis of 2007–2008. We all should be angry, like really fucking angry. To give you an example of what these bonuses could look like here in the UK, we can look to the US, where there is no cap on bonuses. JP Morgan Chase’s boss, Jamie Dimon, was paid a $5m (£4.7m) bonus on top of his regular $1.5m pay. Even with the cap(!) Noel Quinn, the chief executive of London-headquartered HSBC, received a $2.2m bonus, equivalent to 129% of his salary. Are you angry yet? I mean fuck them, the whole lot of them. I get there are other fires to put out first, like the planet dying. I guess we won’t have bankers because we won’t have a planet, but I digress.
The band recorded Mug Cake in an intensive weekend session at Brighton Electric last October. The energy of recording in such a short time infuses this EP with an energy that is missing from so much of this kind of music these days. As fast as it was recorded, the songs don’t lose any focus and are as sharp as a new junkie’s needle. From the humorous attempts to get a decent haircut on “Barbershop” to the nihilistic-rage-against-boredom EP closer, “Offy” — PLAY DEAD sticks to what makes Mug Cake great — rage.