Pound Land – Can’t Stop
Pound Land – Can’t Stop
Cruel Nature Records
Release Date: 24/04/25
Running Time: 31:34
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Greetings, my special ones. I have been incommunicado for too long, what with a frenetic period of wrangling of young people, frenzied attempts to get on top of my new brief at work where I am swapping the young people for wrangling the actual adults, futile attempts to get on top of my NVQ work and somehow fitting sleeping around all of this. It does mean I have been shamefully neglecting my music writing, but unfortunately career progression and earning enough money to keep the Smellhounds and Mrs Dark Juan in treats and art materials respectively. Although Mrs Dark Juan does get treats too. But they aren’t gravy covered biscuit bones.
I also recently came back from finally having had a holiday in Cymru. A country that has always been kind and generous to me, even though I am a Saesneg, having lived there for several years in West Wales and near Aberystwtyth, and having stayed just outside of Criccieth this time. Which was nice and close to RAF Valley, so the RAF kept your correspondent amused with large, expensive and noisy aircraft. Even the Yanks (who must have known I was staying there, OBVIOUSLY) entertained me after having flown a KC-135 Stratotanker through Low Flying Area 7 (the Mach Loop). Much beer, whiskey and other treats were consumed, and I discovered a hitherto unknown knack for poker and took great pleasure in fleecing the fuck out of my family.
It was, during this time away, that I got an email from Steve at Cruel Nature Records, informing me that Pound Land (who Dark Juan considers one of the most important Industrial/ Punk bands in the UK, together with Omnibadger/bael/fuck or whatever it is this week) had released a new album with Adam and Nick returning to their disturbing Lo-fi, Experimental roots while putting together another release together with the full band. Let us unleash this beast upon the Platter of Splatter ™.
If you’re expecting the out and out kitchen-sink chucking, filthy dirty Punk you might expect from Pound Land, you might be disappointed (“Can’t Stop” being a record made by the core duo of founders Nick and Adam), although ‘I Spy’ is a gloriously unhinged piece of Punk-fused, bass-led Industrial madness with an insistently pitched (and getting higher as the outrage increases) vocal whose fury only increases the longer the song goes on, whereas ‘Janet’s Here’ is a weird little bit of music which underpins the literal, brainless doggerel people will speak with each other when in conversation.
‘Affordable Luxury’ is another one of the great unhinged musical rants that only Pound Land can do – starting from a demented singing voice extolling the virtues of leather shoes over a throbbing electronic noise, before the song builds and builds into a painful, screaming, clattering mess as the vocal sprawls and takes in police reports, whether or not a painting is a genuine Banksy, lottery winners, sofas and whatever else is sparking through the misfiring synapses of Adam and Nick a that moments, in a sneering, searing paean to anti-capitalism and the way that commerce has even hijacked our entertainment to the point to where there are entire fucking TV CHANNELS devoted to selling crap and parting you from your money, where they don’t give the slightest fuck about whether you are bankrupting yourself, just about extracting every last penny from you and excreting posted tat, forever wanting to be fed profit and shitting out product the kind of shit that you get out of the box and use once and then forever exile it to the back of your cupboard – the portable walrus cleaning kit, the SuperMegaUltraSuperJuicer 6000 Turbo with automated peeling function and blowjob or clit sucker depending on your gender and genitals, the auto-coiling hose that breaks after a single use because it is made of plastic and rubber so brittle it has to be treated like the most delicate of Chinese porcelain – the kind of shit that is mass produced in Far Eastern factories by ten year olds earning 40 cents a day doing 16 hour days, seven days a week, just so some fat bastard in Bolsover or Buttfuck, Nebraska can have it delivered within 48 hours because he/ she is bored or drunk and their rapidly shrinking disposable income isn’t going to a) spend itself, or b) do the company any good sat in the back account of the punter. We must take it from them! This is all delivered in some of the snottiest, grim Mancunian I have ever heard, and trust me, I lived in Manchester for many years growing up and you’d only hear accent like this from One Tooth Phil from New Moston. This is of course fucking brilliant because only Mancs can distil the purest disdain and their impotent rage into their words and yet somehow still remain approachable, and dare I say it, likeable.
That’s where Pound Land’s magic is. They might create soundscapes that sound like octopuses hurling cast iron at concrete walls and shattering glass, wailing sirens, strobe lighting and steam and water spraying in all directions as masonry crashes down around your ears, but they have charm and a knowing look in their eye as they rail and roar against injustices and the inequality of British society. The music sometimes barely qualifies as music and is more just a soundtrack to stream-of-consciousness craziness that would have a more sane person running screaming for the nearest exit, rather than Dark Juan sitting here lapping it all up like a cat that really has got the cream (or because I am staunchly working class, the condensed milk) because this is where his politics lie. Dark Juan is a foot soldier in the Pound Land campaign.
First we take Moston, then we take Higher Broughton.
If you like deeply idiosyncratic, spasmodic, jerky music that spreads its influences in every direction from Dub to Grunge and ties it all together with maschinenklang percussion and vocals that are designed specifically to annoy, then Pound Land might be for you. I love them because they are the true voice of what Northern Britain sounds like. It is a grim, bleak place which has denizens rather than citizens, yet beneath the grime and the poverty and the rabid capitalism insistent on strangling everyone for profit, there’s beauty, and there’s humour and there’s an absolutely unquenchable spirit in the people here. Grit and determination and a lot of fucking complaining gets us through. That’s what Pound Land represents – an unfair, uncaring, shit world that we fight against every day.
This release is Pound Land stripped back to their bare essentials, less a terrifying wall of noise and roaring, and instead a very disturbing, minimalist exploration of the seedier sides of normal life in the UK, punctuated by inchoate screaming insanity.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System awards Pound Land 9/10 for another timely and deeply worrying release that plays tricks on the mind and spreads chaos in the soul.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Armed With Flapjack
02. Watching TV
03. Lathkill
04. Stuff
05. I Spy
06. Janet’s Here
07. Affordable Luxury
08. EGG
09. Unit 1
LINE-UP:
Adam Stone
Nick Harris
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
