ELECTRONICA
BY STEPHEN WORTHY
Creep Show
★★★★
Yawning Abyss
BELLA UNION. DL/LP
Electronic dream team tackle Armageddon with wit and snarling synths.
“Computers are such strange bedfellows,” opines a vocodered John Grant on The Bellows, the juddering opener to Creep Show’s second album of analogue synth-driven electronic funk. Strange? Perhaps, but fun is being had under these sheets. Creep Show’s 2018 debut, Mr Dynamite, saw Grant join Wrangler – Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, Tunng’s Phil Winters and analogue synth maven Benge – to form a super electronic supergroup. But where Mr Dynamite was quietly menacing, Yawning Abyss is spritely and upbeat; Creep Show peer into that abyss wearing sardonic grins. Grant and Mallinder share vocals, although the former predominates, his darkly angelic vocals and rare wit well-suited to computerised accompaniment. Yahtzee! is dipped in acid squiggle and breakbeat, Grant commanding us to “play Twister while the kids watch their favourite porn”. Moneyback may be a hitherto unforeseeable alliance between Madonna’s Vogue and Captain Sensible’s Wot, but its sharpelbowed electro is infectious. A furiously funky soundtrack to impending doom.