Chew Magna is the eponymous debut album from the Manchester’s alt-rockers who share their name with the Somerset village (a thriving centre for wool in the Middle Ages) and it’s a pyroclastic blast of fuzz and feedback that delivers big on tunes and power chords. They are Joel on bass, Simon on guitar, Ben on drums, Laurie on guitar and vocals.
Their debut is a smorgasbord of styles but nothing feels out of place and the band move with ease from the helter-skelter pounding of ‘Listless’, with its relentless tom toms and anxious guitar riffs, through the Cult/Black Sabbath feel of ‘Stubborn Knots’ (phased guitar and banshee-scream solo) to ‘Punk Dick’ which pits dissonant guitar against bass and drums in a heavy machinery fight club before it switches to double time at the end like a riot at a punk club.
There’s a sweet opening to both ‘Watching Paint Dry’ and ‘4232’, with the former morphing into a pulse quickening lockstep of bass and guitar, and the latter being a dizzying Psychedelic Furs-style track that switches its time signatures between bars of 7 and bars of 6. ‘Question Everything’ fires out a stratospheric vocal with an urgency that mirrors its subject matter about the folly of people who blindly believe everything without proof. ‘Spat Out’ mines more 90s indie-pop with a keening guitar riff and the album closer ‘Pretty Loose’ sends us off with a dizzying mix of psych-pop and one last burst of barely contained fuzz-energy.
Chew Magna are a band that take all the great ingredients from their influences and create their own powerful flavours. All four members have the ability to shine individually and then coalesce into an explosive, almost volcanic, whole. Chew Magna? More like Chew Magma.
You can order the limited edition vinyl through Stray Cat Records and listen via streaming services including Spotify.
Chew Magna socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X (Twitter) | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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