Born from out of a solo lockdown project, Thee Alcoholics are now a fully-fledged psych rock band, one charged to storm the city streets, ready to rally against the system. Formed by ex-Hey Colossus drummer Rhys Llewellyn, the latest statement by this mysterious five-piece ‘Feedback’ was released on Rocket Recordings in February 2024. Watch your step as you listen, as this 9-track album is in a hurry to leave an impression and it certainly succeeds with its sublime caterwaul of guitars, drums and synths across its 30-minute runtime.
Thee Alcoholics are very much a noisy rock ‘n’ roll band for our current times. Led by Llewellyn’s often slurred and throaty vocals which gurgle and spits out Mark E Smith style street poetry, the band’s power revolves around repetition. This repetition is found in often very catchy and monosyllabic lyrics, filthy garage rock riffs from Motor City the Stooges or Mudhoney would be proud of, mono-rhythmic drums that equally pound and groove and occasionally meander into early Sonic Youth or Silver Apples territory, all coated with plenty of fuzz and organ drone.
The songs on Feedback are often heavy in both tone and theme. Raw and aggressive, mechanical yet organic, the album is packed with sludgy riffs and squalls of noise which rise in intensity across clanging and clanking percussion. The first single, ‘Baby I’m Your Man’ is a call to arms: “So good / so divine / so rude / it’s a crime”. With a post-punk scratchiness, it is scuzzy and defiant, where the air feels spiked with tension. Dreary vocals drift across chugging riffs riding on sledgehammer drums, later joined by marvellous sax skronk supplied by Colin Webster, who also contributes to another standout moment in the beautiful sprawl intro of ‘SE23’.
Amazing second single ‘It’s So Easy’ is perhaps the band at their most upbeat, even whisper it, poppy, but it is still packed with thunderous aggression. Lurking on a riff infected by the Queens of the Stone Age, it roars along at pace to find a Fall-indebted chorus and fantastic, distorted screams. A beautiful chaos all wrapped up in just over 2 minutes.
“Back me … sack me … attack me.” The last track to be released before the album dropped was ‘Dumb and Happy’, which begins with vacuum cleaner like drones, before a swaggering riff kicks in and vitriolic vocals menacingly snarl over pulsing drums: “Happy happy / so dumb and happy”.
Whereas previous excellent release ‘Tape II’ (Wrong Speed Records, 2021) has the feeling of a mixtape, a fraying patchwork of urban scree, Feedback feels very much like a finely produced live album – when you listen to it, you most definitely feel the vibrations bouncing off the walls from a frantic basement show. At times, the album shares the chaotic energy of Lightning Bolt mixed with Girls Against Boys post-hardcore, the punk ethos of Nation of Ulysses, John Dwyer’s garage psych by way of the Velvet Underground, or even a sped-up version of the Australian band the Drones at their most political.
In the poem ‘London’, published in 1794, William Blake wrote: “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” Thee Alcoholics takes the listener on a dérive down contemporary London streets and bars and clubs and offers a glimpse of social environments pasted together with blood, sweat and tears and caked with years of cultural sickness. Blake suggested that the experience of living in London (swap out for any other UK place as applicable) could encourage a revolution on the streets – Feedback is the sound of Thee Alcoholics expressing themselves live, loud and true.
Wandering these streets, under a dimly lit, post-midnight concrete malaise – the songs found on Feedback could be a present-day echo of fragments from Blake’s ‘Songs of Experience’. The album collects sonic and lyrical detritus that has been well trodden underfoot, which speak of corruption brought on by adulthood and restriction imposed by authorities. It points to a lack of freedom and a cultural ouroboros of narcissism and ego, dependants and dependencies, addiction and self-loathing. Thee Alcoholics have made a living document portraying a positive feedback loop, one where the above negative trends are amplified just like a squealing feedback loop that can occur when a mic is brought too close to a speaker.
London street poet Bongo Mike wrote in 1974’s ‘A Solitary Walk’, “But still I praise this lonely walk, Alone but never lonely”. A reminder that we are all alone together and through the daily cycles and constant repetitions life throws our way we need to ensure we listen to feedback from others and continually create a noise to make feedback of our own. Thee Alcoholics album Feedback admirably ticks both these boxes.
They are a proper rock and roll band for 2024, stripped of the connotations of what a rock and roll band used to think it had to be, twisting and distorted and seemingly bleeding out in the same yellow and black as the album cover – the awesome Roy Lichtenstein ‘Crying Girl’ inspired artwork by South London artist Little Mouse, with its echoes of ‘I Cry For You’ by Bobby Orlando and Sonic Youth’s ‘Goo’.
Following on from Picasso’s post-Guernica anti-war ‘Weeping Woman’ series, Lichtenstein’s Crying Girl work shows vulnerable teary-eyed women caught in a lament, sisters to the artwork representing Feedback. Although these examples depict a single-panel comic representations of a moment in time, they capture this moment pregnant with drama. This very much taps into the ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ snapshot nature of the songs found on Feedback. Seeing as cycles are often doomed to repeat, Feedback honours the tradition of the crying girl, who in this instance could very much be crying at the state of the world today for a whole multitude of reasons.
“There is no hesitation / This is your situation / Continue a blank generation,” Smith snarled in the Fall’s ‘Repetition’. Repetition again keeps coming up. But in the case of the actual songs found on Feedback, this repetition only works as a pure positive. Hidden under the heavy layers of muck and debris are proper songs with singalong choruses – melodies that you can find rattling around your head, as you catch yourself humming along to the incredible dirge squall that is ‘Pity Me’, while you shuffle past another empty shop beneath another grey city skyline: “Down on the street / factory / I am disease / no entry”.
Championing the underground, chasing shadows overground, Thee Alcoholics has all the potential to be your next favourite band. They could be the self-help group you never knew you were looking for. Why don’t you take a dose of their feedback today?
Feedback is out now on yellow vinyl and digital on Rocket Recordings – you can listen and support on Bandcamp:
https://thee-alcoholics.bandcamp.com/album/feedback
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theealcoholics
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/theealcoholics
Ryan Hooper
MEANS 