There are a lot of nice people making nice music at the moment, in nice jumpers, with their nice fringes, carrying their nice little keyboards unplugged to the photoshoot. Nice. In deepest, darkest Barnoldswick they don’t do nice. You can’t get a soybean latte for love nor money. Effluence are still drinking from the babbling spring of young manhood, but they seem completely untouched by the pristine niceties of the pop culture which surrounds us. Gloriously out of step, they offer an oasis of fuzzy radioactive trash in a desert of anodyne beige. But this is not a retrograde act of contrariness – people still want noisy, nasty guitar music with attitude.

 

This 4-track EP is not a showcase of jaw-dropping songcraft or pioneering soundscapes. It’s a ghost train blast which invokes that long-lost surge of excitement you felt the first time you heard Incesticide or Origin of Symmetry. The monolithic pounding of Redrum charges headlong into the kind of speedy grunge psychosis you would associate with The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. Green Room and Milky share a repetitive Eastern motif, and it’s unlike anything rock bands of the 21st century are trying to do. This further condenses the heavy fog of alienation and antithesis that clings to these songs. Vocalist/guitarist Sam leads us through these tortured vignettes with a murderous howl, and screams from the deepest catcombs of the gut (not calculated, treated emo-screaming; think The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow and Cobain). The clean-to-dirty guitar dynamic is a path well-trodden, yet it would be wrong to suggest that the Effluence sound is entirely derivative. The trajectory often confounds expectations; song parts crash into each other, dissolve, then crawl back into view. Jelly Liver is a spiked cocktail of aphoristic non-sequiturs and doom-laden bass drone. It sounds like a maniacal Macbeth conversing with malign ghosts, visions and voices.  

 

What they sometimes lack in neat focus and proportion, they render largely irrelevant through a beguiling angle of attack. Effluence could well be the dark, dangerous rock band this part of Lancashire has always threatened, yet never sent forth. Let’s hope that they are not polluted by evil influences from the Planet Nice.