BRUM’S garage-psych-doom power trio Table Scraps have, like the rest of us, been busy frying their heads and kicking anxious heels indoors for like: doesn’t it feel like forever now? But they’ve also been busy with the guitar, bass and drums and things, because the lockdown league is one you can play your way out of.
September will see a new album from them rejoicing in the title Coffin Face, which ups the game, comes out swinging. The band say: “[It’s] a serious record in the old-fashioned way that’s also kinda not serious at all.”
Coffin Face was originally conceived as a concept album way back in 2018 – remember that? Gigs and stuff? – and the underlying story was to be of a band emerging from the rubble of a post-apocalyptic event. Only then we got 2020 dropped on our asses for our sins – like cheers, whoever did that, you so get detention – and the work in progress took on the mantle of a soundtrack to the new viral reality.
The album was recorded and mixed entirely at the band’s lockup in Digbeth, Birmingham, initially in a break from big trips out and about in Europe and at SXSW, gaining peers as fans in the shape of IDLES, Amyl & The Sniffers and stoner legends Monster Magnet; and as time wore on and everything decided to get weirder, the songs became more expansive and ambitious.
Need to hear something with a razored punk edge, proper power and something that’d have Tommy Vance singing its praises, were the Friday Night Rock Show still a thing? Head down to the bottom there, delight in the riff and the heavy 1969-psych harmonies of a first taste from the album, “Threads”: they’ve the got the energy, they will not close their eyes, or even act surprised. Table Scraps will. Not. Lie. Down. And. Take. This. Capisce?
Elsewhere in the riffin’ landscape of Coffin Face, you can look forward to the claustrophobic “Never Liked It Anyway”, the blast of “Doom Generation”and the spindly venom of “Apology”.
“Heat Beat” takes the surf groove and whizzes it through a blender, while “Big Man” rocks mightily and brings the righteous dressing down to toxic masculinity.
As the old saying goes in Birmingham: “It is what it is.” And you know this, you so know this: you can’t keep a good band down.
Table Scraps’ Coffin Face will be released on September 24th but get your PayPal out, cos you can order it right now over at Bandcamp.
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