It seems that the concrete expanse of Scottish cities, existing beneath slate-grey skies, is the perfect environment to produce rowdy post-punk. APB, Josef K, The Jesus And Mary Chain, and Cocteau Twins are just some of the bands from Scotland to gain global recognition and now you can add Tijuana Bibles to that illustrious list. Taking the street suss of the Arctic Monkeys, the poetic beauty of Nick Cave and delivering it with the riffage of Queens Of The Stone Age was always going to be a potent mix, and potency is something their latest album, Free Milk, delivers in spades.
There’s no fancy introductions or preliminaries to butter us up, just opening shot ‘Stateless’ arriving like a bullet from a pistol, you don’t see it until it is right between your eyes, and subsequently, it’s all the more powerful for it. Full of angular guitars, pounding drums and throat-shredding vocals, it’s an “experience” alright, and one that can floor even the most hardy listener. However, it becomes immediately apparent that this is not going to be an ordinary record, whilst ‘Stateless’ was dense and thickly layered, the following ‘Pariah’ incorporates more white space, yet the approach is similar. Tijuana Bibles use repetition as a weapon to batter down the door to your cranium. Vocalist Tony Costello continually screams “I’m a pariah” with such conviction and instance that you have no option but to open up and let him in.
With all the songs hovering around the three-minute mark, Tijuana Bibles don’t hang around long enough to bore us, but with each track bursting at the seams with good ideas, there’s never a chance of that. Often the songs will veer into existentialism; just like classic The Fall, Tijuana Bibles will often step outside their songs and deconstruct them, or they will introduce sound effects to really drive a point home. The result is a record that constantly repositions the listener, you don’t so much listen as experience it. It’s not like, say, an Iron Maiden album which exists within certain parameters, you feel Free Milk could fracture in any direction, but hold on, it probably will. You might expect an angular, aggressive and eclectic album to be unlistenable, but Free Milk is quite the opposite; the band never lose sight of melody and it underpins pretty much everything they do, sometimes it might be buried deep, beneath unorthodox time signatures or suchlike, but it’s always there.
The band arrived in rowdy fashion, and that’s exactly as they depart with the rumbustious ‘Pill’, with Tony’s visceral vocals, James Brannigan’s skidding guitar, and the punchy rhythm section of drummer Mikey Dornan and bassist Danny Costello all combining to make their presence felt, and when they all stop on a dime, makes the silence that follows positively deafening. There’s currently a huge void in the music industry just waiting to be filled by a rowdy post-punk band, and on the strength of Free Milk, Tijuana Bibles could be that group.
- Free Milk is released via Button Up Records on 8th December 2023.
- Official Website
Track List:
- Stateless
- Pariah
- Three Is A Cult
- The Wave
- Architect
- Free Milk
- Unknown
- Human Touch
- Slip Into The Leather
- Billionairhead
- Pill
