Child’s Pose Eyes to the Right EP
I fell in love with ELASTICA long before I ever had the opportunity to hear WIRE, and the collective works of RED MONKEY and Slampt Records were basically responsible for shifting my attention toward spiky DIY-revolutionary sounds in the late ’90s, so the acerbic, whiplash angular pop destruction of this second CHILD’S POSE EP is basically a direct line to the pleasure centers of my brain. Raw-nerve guitar slashes and needles, stark, see-sawing rhythms give way to total frantic tumbling-down-the-stairs inertia, and Sop’s vocals careen from fierce, spoken word detachment to wild ebullience breaking down and drawing out words into entirely new sound forms, with “Eyes to the Right” posing the eternal punk question “Do you ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” with a more genuine sense of danger (and simultaneously, anarchic joy) than anything Sir Jonathan Rotten ever snarled. Perfect pogo anthems for complicated modern realities.