By Jim Rowland
Liverpool misfits YOBS release their self-titled debut album via Fuzz Club, following on from their debut double single, ‘Fortune Teller’ b/w ‘Cemetery Man’, which saw the garage-punk four-piece burst on the scene late last year in a gloriously scuzzy and hedonistic blaze. It’s a short, sweet and incendiary statement of intent from a band set to make a serious impact.
The album’s ten tracks clock in at a rapid 26-minute running time, so it gets straight to the point. This is intense, aggressive, hard-edged, primitive garage-punk, often dark and at times claustrophobic, oozing the spirit of the old but most definitely incorporating a clever, contemporary twist.
‘Shitty Eye’, ‘Fortune Teller’, ‘Tito Puente’ and ‘Carpet Burns’ are all solid slices of noisy old school garage-punk with a hint of vintage UK Subs to it, opener ‘YOBS Theme’ is high-octane punk’n’roll with a big mob chorus, and the hedonistic ‘Wasted’ provides the album’s catchiest song, and the obvious single choice.
Elsewhere the dirty, grinding ‘Plastercine’ comes across like a cross between The Fall and The Stooges, which is never a bad combination, the vicious and quite superb ‘Head The Ball’ has a great hypnotic quality to it, and once again a slight influence of The Fall, whilst the twisted garage rock of ‘Cemetery Man’ has a psyche edge to it, and the excellent ‘Cyanide’ is blistering fast punk bordering on hardcore.
A thrilling, thumping listen from start to finish, melding the old with the new to fine effect, ‘YOBS’ is truly wonderful stuff, and one hell of a debut album.