Credit: Found On Internet

Do you remember when Primal Scream weren’t shit? It was about 3 albums ago, give or take. When Bobby Gillespie and his gang of chancers were nailing all manner of electronica onto their guitars and seeing what stuck. If they hadn’t decided to get old and fat and dull, and had instead got thinner and harder and more at-arms-length, they’d have mutated into something similar to Alloy Mental.

Name-DJ Phil Kieran certainly has the pedigree behind the bleeps and beats, and coupled with the more band-based sensibilities of vocalist Martin Corrigan and guitarist Danny Saul, there are some tremendous ideas lurking in this record. ‘God Is Green’ is like the inside of Adam Ant’s head if someone nailed neon strobe lights all over every available neural synapse. Starting off like a headrush in a field full of flies, high on speed, ‘People Are Strange’ feels like you’re coming up at the same time as being teleported to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Title track, ‘We Have Control’, is a neo-industrial nightmare, manifesting like solid snakes of sound seeping straight out of the speakers. This is the new national anthem when the robots on car plant assembly lines rise up to take control of the nation. Then with ‘Light’, Alloy Mental close their debut album with a fierce slab of schizophrenic waveforms. When the record finally peters out into silence, I can feel some cold sweat on my back.

The problem is so many of their ideas splutter out. Good concepts are constantly surrounded by non-descript electro backwash. It keeps getting so very, very close, and then not quite delivering a killer hook.

It’s not quite up there with Justice’s recent effort, as far as effortless electronic cool goes, nor does it have the grabbed-by-the-balls catchiness of LCD Soundsystem. But Alloy Mental have got something intense, something tribal, something righteous in amongst their sounds. Well worth an investigation.

‘We Have Control’ is out on June 25 on Skint Records.