Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons Screams to God LP reissue
KITCHEN AND THE PLASTIC SPOONS were an early ’80s Swedish synth(etic) punk project with a dark, dramatic intensity—too art-conceptual to be humorless goths, too sinister and paranoid-sounding to pass as straight new wave, the aural equivalent of black latex as viewed through a prism of fluorescent plexiglass. Although they didn’t take things quite as far as the SCREAMERS or the UNITS by completely dispensing with guitars, KITCHEN AND THE PLASTIC SPOONS’ double-synth/live drums assault was charged with a similar short-circuited energy, while original vocalist Anne’s steely yet still hyper-expressive delivery (almost exclusively in English) wavered somewhere between SIOUXSIE-style ice queen and Neue Deutsche Welle eccentricity. Screams to God covers the entirety of the group’s brief 1980–81 lifespan, with the recordings from their debut Serve You! 7” (four songs mistakenly made it to the test pressing, later pared down to two for the actual release) hitting especially hard: the space junk synth squirm of “Blätta” devolves to perfectly DEVO depths; “Happy Funeral” careens across an oscillating and claustrophobic keys/drums pulse as Anne defiantly smashes any goth illusions (“no black suits!”); “Fantastic” and “In Bars” warp and bend under layers of processed dystopian electronics and clattering percussion. Dark Entries first put out this collection almost ten years ago, when millennial punks were just on the cusp of a mass blame-it-on-DEVO synth infatuation, and it’s been a highly sought-after artifact almost ever since—I’m not saying that there’s a direct cause/effect correlation there, but I’m also not saying that there isn’t one.