Mugstar: Ad Marginem

In an incredibly desperate attempt to describe these sounds, this is the situation…

There’s a storm coming. You can feel it in your pores. It bloody hurts. Head throbbing, skin tensing and crackling, the ground beneath you feels ready to buckle. You’re ready to fight, with anything and anybody. You want that rain to come to dispense with all the tension, illness and stuff. The fibres of the world need wringing out. The air fills with the portentous and the ominous. The stillness is suffocating. Bastard.

The rain comes, yet not in the hoped for wave and deluge. Instead it fades, almost slides in. It might not be the biblical black rain you’d had faith in, but it comes nonetheless. But then the throb returns and your desires for the flood become anxious. It never comes. You resign yourself to the pleasure of constant tension and apprehension. It’s peculiar but incredibly gratifying. The swearing and cussing (temporarily) ceases.

It needn’t matter that I’ve never seen the film that Mugstar’s Ad Marginem soundtracks (based around Liverpool I believe). It needn’t matter because this is Mugstar at their most intelligent and evocative. They might have returned from their space travels for this album – it might be more meteorological than astrological – but it reveals a progression in their sound that’s both exciting and gives hope for this here fan. And with another album on the horizon (Axis, due 29th October 2012, pre-order here) it’s a great time to be a Mugstar fan.

Go buy.

Mugstar ‘Act 1’ @ Rough Trade East, London. 29/6/12: