Back in the late 80s/early 90s, Terminal Cheesecake’s monstrous bellow, ‘What the hell was that beautiful racket?’, became the rallying cry for ne’er-do-wells and noiseniks stumbling punchdrunk between the head-caving, dub-infested likes of Godflesh, God and Oxbow.
TC were among the hardest of the bunch to get a handle on: a wilfully absurdist, multi-layered echo-chamber where the random thoughts festered and multiplied until songs keeled over from their own weight.
Now they’re back, as a live entity at least, with Neil Francis from Gnod on vocals, and they’re still a psychedelic journey to the end of your tether. Neil’s reverb-drenched chants (‘Hey Eugene… where you going with that bowl of chicken… and your… syringe’) are layered over riffs that act like coals on a conveyor belt to feed a wildfire furnace, as classics like Blowhound and Bladdersac are revisited like a bruised face in a hall of mirrors.
