I first saw Snapped Ankles when they supported Songhoy Blues at the Southbank as part of Niles Rodgers Meltdown. Despite the audience’s initial bewilderment at the stage being inhabited by musicians wearing ghillie suits and hitting logs as well as their instruments, the infectious rhythms and between-song banter won the audience over and, along with me, new fans were born.
The band have ventured out of the forest once more to announce their new album Hard Times Furious Dancing with ‘Raoul’ as the first chlorophyllically-enhanced single, described as “a feverish conversation about geopolitics between unreliable narrators over buzzing synths and howling dogs”.
This is a Magical Hysteria Tour shot on wonky VHS video and full of symbolism. We move between town and sea, a masked bellboy and a man in a hare’s mask wave to a ghillie-suited giant dragging a radiator, and a suited crow brandishes a pin and a balloon. Given the recent death of David Lynch, the songs references to the horror perpetrated in suburbia behind perfect white picket fences is unhappily synchronous, especially in the song’s cry of “everybody look the other way, everybody look the other way”.
Deep beats and 16-bit bloops cascade over the driving rhythms you expect from Snapped Ankles. Urgent vocals and howls amplify the feeling that everything is not okay and the whole feels like a swampy Talking Heads bringing us a more organic paranoia. It’s a glorious introduction to the new album.
‘Raoul’ is out now and Hard Times Furious Dancing is released on 28th March in a myriad of versions including limited edition luminous vinyl and, if you’re quick, a vinyl Dinked Edition. Released on the LEAF Label.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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