by Matt Watton (@brotinus)
The Minneapolis Uranium Club Band are burdened with expectations. Their music is expected to be hard hitting and immediate, their lyrics expected to be cerebral and absurd, their live performances rapturous and intense, their band profile tantalizingly minimal. These expectations only grew stronger as time elapsed between releases (six years since the full-length Cosmo Cleaners) and sporadic live performances. At long last, the Club has released new music, Infants Under the Bulb, a record that does what all great records by great bands do: overdelivers on some expectations and completely thwarts others. Make no mistake: the Uranium Club is back, and they’ve outdone themselves.
The platonic ideal of a Uranium Club song is agitated and agitating: dueling guitar stabs and outbursts over a foundation of languid bass and impossibly fast four-on-the-floor drumming; speak-sung vocals delivered with deep emotion and palpable sarcasm about alienation and esoterica. Miraculously, IUTB delivers six or seven of these perfect tunes. “Small Grey Man” is a well-chosen opener, as understated chords and plodding tom-toms let the tension build and build – it’s a tension that sticks with you through the entire album, ebbing and flowing but never fully released. The Club is in their finest form on tracks like “Viewers Like You,” “2-600-Lullaby,” and “The Big Guitar Jackoff in the Sky.” They are the tightest, most vigorous punk band on the planet, but somehow also the most accessible and infectious. These songs get you moving and slamming while also being unstoppable earworms.
Perhaps by way of apologizing for a long absence, these songs are not stingy with riffs. The band weaves together part after part, tasty lick after tasty lick, dragging you along to uncharted domains. The most chaotic track, “Abandoned by the Narrator,” sees the trio of singers trading verse for verse, scream for scream, with an epic drum fill smack dab in the middle of an even more epic backbeat. The instrumental “Game Show” is a standout – at times the four players jockey for position, each capturing a second of your attention, only to then sync up for coordinated lines that fully entrance your aural space. Lyrically, the album evokes modern disillusionment through humor and obscurity: lines about drooling on cashmere, international phone calls, soap opera stars… this is the bread and butter of the Uranium Club.
The Club remains challenging as ever, defying expectations with the tune “Tokyo, Paris, L.A., Milan” – upon first listen, it sounds extremely out of place, like a bizarre but palatable indie tune with straightforward and lush chords and a predictable song structure. But the song has an unrelenting bite and sinister subtext, and reveals its punk-ness simply by being an inexplicable song choice. Of course, the band would never be satisfied if there wasn’t a totally inscrutable musical gesture, here the four-part narrated love story “The Wall,” a surprisingly touching series of vignettes sprinkled throughout the record (one can appreciate this shorter format over the two interminable monologues on their previous record).
What continues to make the Uranium Club so compelling is their ability to drive the punk idiom towards new horizons, to cultivate a truly original sound and vision (see the amazing cover photo) that is arty but not pretentious, chaotic but not cacophonous, conceptual but not out of touch. This is one of the best punk records in a long time, and in a discography of incomparable music, it’s arguable that IUTB is their best work yet.