There’s a time and a place for subtlety, and mclusky have never felt the need to go there. The improbably enduring Welsh noise-rock band has always staked their lyricism on the kind of brash, sardonic bite that got them minimized as “clever” or “irreverent” in early-2000s music press. But it was never just for show: You can’t go a few tracks on the group’s breakout 2002 LP mclusky “Do Dallas” without them applying that brazen song writing to critiques of corporate rock sponsorships or hypercompetitive scene posturing.
Mclusky are a band who were a band, weren’t a band, then are a band again. they formed in the late nineties and unformed, for the first time, in 2005, after three albums, opinions of which can be found on the internet.
So what is a band to do with their long-awaited comeback when they’ve always been saying the quiet part loud? mclusky’s answer: say it even louder. Inevitably armed with more than a mere return LP (2025’s “The World Is Still Here and So Are We)” could say, the three-piece are back once more with a six-song postscript. Lest you mistake “I Sure Am Getting Sick of This Bowling Alley” as pithy sass factory—its title not the band’s first invocation of this setting—guitarist/vocalist Andy “Falco” Falkous dispels that notion less than two minutes in with an uneasy couplet: “No one gets me like you do / Not even kids in body bags.”
As an EP, “Bowling Alley” is an exercise in miniature in how far mclusky can render wry humour into startling clarity. The banal evil of cushy computer jobs, depletion of natural resources, and nostalgia as toxic stagnation are all very real targets at which the band takes aim, but they attack them as if chucking tomatoes that hide pipe bombs. Of course, this being a mclusky record, the distortion-heavy riffs are too big and rousing to take too seriously, with tracks such as “As a Dad” and “Spock Culture” staying bouncy enough to keep the listener in on the joke. Even when the group takes on a relative whisper on closer “That Was My Brain on Elves,” they keep it lined with dry punchlines: “I understood, finally, that animals have feelings / But not in a way they can monetize.”
Most exhilarating of all, though, is “Fan Learning Difficulties.” Initially lumbering, the track truly comes to life when it suddenly lurches at its midpoint, sprinting headfirst into harried freefall. What sears deepest is the line Falkous sneers at the start of the simmer: “Americans think that they live in America.” Whether about fan entitlement or Americentricism on a larger scale (or both), there’s no question about it being a condemnatory sentiment as loud as any of mclusky’s compositions. Subtlety was never their strong suit, anyhow.
their mini-album, “i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley,” out march 20th (digital) / may 1 (vinyl).
The Fat Angel Sings 