Gotta love the Leeds scene. It keeps on throwing up noisy bands who really capture the zeitgeist. Sure, the city’s been redeveloped and gentrified and is a world away from the dingy days of Thatcher’s Britain, which saw it become the heartland of the early 80s goth scene. But for all its plush shopping centres and slick office spaces, home to wealthy finance firms, and for the way university life is now less The Young Ones and more the domain of the well-heeled – most often from overseas – who can afford to take on forty grand’s debt with only limited hope of a better job – it’s still a place where there is considerable poverty.
My generation was lied to: we were promised ‘graduate jobs’ which paid salaries well above the national average. Call me a failure: after a three-year degree in English literature – followed by an MA, and then a PHD, I failed to land a job which paid a ‘graduate’ wage and eventually, twenty-five years after graduation, I had my three student loans written off. Yes, I’d advocate staying poor as a career choice, naturally.
I digress somewhat, but the Leeds scene has always been, and continues to be, different. More recent years has seen the city’s sound move away from goth to noisy shit. This fashion started in the mid 00s, with the likes of That Fucking Tank, Pulled Apart by Horses, and These Monsters, and there was oddball stuff like Forward Russia! And This Et Al, and while lumped in with the post-rock trend. iLiKETRAiNS (later I Like Trains) always stood apart. Leeds has long been… well, different.
Forensics are different, too, and quintessentially Leeds, too. As they pitch it, they’re ‘Influenced by a desire to establish a sound that was as gritty as it was unrelenting’ and ‘have set straight their objective from the start; to put the world to rights as an unforgivably noisy 5 piece unafraid to incorporate influences from noise to hardcore punk, from black metal to garage rock’.
‘Dogtown’ is raw and biting. It’s built around a dingy, grainy garage-rock bassline, and during the verses, a sinewey guitar line twists through skewed angles in a fashion that calls to mind The Jesus Lizard, and, by some kind of default, Blacklisters. Then the chorus drives straight ahead with a racing urgency, the rabid punk vocals reminiscent of a screamier Wayne Barrett of Slaughter and the Dogs. It’s fierce.
AA
