Released:
Rating: ★★★
The Blinders’ new LP creeps on you, starting with the opening track, ‘Something Wicked Comes This Way’. Despite drifting away from their utopian vendetta, they’re as devilish. Any delights they serve are dubious.
‘Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath’, produced by Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey, Anna Calvi) was recorded in sixteen days in Manchester’s Eve Studios. It has that sense of urgency to it. If debut ‘Columbia’ was The Blinders redirecting their rage to serve a higher purpose, this time their demons are too wild to be tamed. We get a full-blown danse macabre.
The Blinders are home-stay psychopaths on a trip inwards, getting out all the confusion and disgust in a form of drowsy post-punk, marrying grimmest of Joy Division with Bad Seeds.
Tom sheds a skin of Columbia’s Johnny Dream to become a bed-ridden Deserter. The Blinder’s second album is the last outrage of a man standing on the edge of the canyon. He’s tired of plotting schemes to abolish the rich and ignorant. Losing faith in society, he became a horrendous outlet for suppressed disappointment and despair.
They’ve created a Nick Cave-like self-contained all-or-nothing universe where violence reigns and the rules are random. ‘Circle Song’ is a tale of an internal battle to the rockadelic groove. We meet the Lucifer eye to eye in ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’, chant the greed away in ‘I Want Gold’ and condemn money-obsessed modern dictators to the march drums ridden madness.
The Blinders, indulging in their dirtiest fantasies are not looking for a way out but make sure that the struggle documented. So maybe we can use it to ignite our own rebellion as inspired by Dylan Thomas’ poem track, ‘Rage At The Dying Of The Light’, directs. Or just lay-low with a lover dearest and listen to Lennon-like ballad, ‘In This Decade’.
Is it an over-the-top Shakespearian tragedy with existential flair? It is momentarily too melodramatic to digest? Yes, and yes. Though if you’re ready to face the deep-down darkness you’ve probably built up during lockdown, it’s now or never. The Blinders got the timing suspiciously right.
Aleksandra Brzezicka
