The Fat Angel Sings

The Minneapolis Uranium Club have been steadily cranking out nervous, wiry, weirdly hooky punk rock for the past few years. And next month, they’ll follow up their 2017 album All Of Them Naturals with a new one called The Cosmo Cleaners. The band actually sold test pressings of the album on their European tour last year, but now the rest of us will get to hear it. And they’ve now shared “Man Is The Loneliest Animal,” a five-minute sprawl of a song, epic for DIY punk, that starts out as a languidly jittery Unwound-esque meditation and then turns into a freaked-out sprint. It sounds a bit like what might’ve happened if the Modern Lovers had come up in the Bandcamp-hardcore era.

Smile cautiously as the Uranium Club welcomes you into their stinky apartment. You’ve been here before, right? Oh, that must have been some one else. Do you have a brother or sister? One of the members mumbles some deceptively eloquent bullshit as he hands you a drink. His lips are dark red and chapped; he looks really bad. But the drink is wet, and those stairs had been tall. Sit down, lean back, sip it. It rolls around your tongue, hides between your teeth, a perfectly TV-worthy combination of pleasure and mischief.  It’s supposed to go into your ears! How crazy is that? Such a sensation of taste, transmogrified for the realm of sound? Is it Sprite, or is it… music? Careful, engaging, and dare-I-say theatrical vocals over hyper bass-and-drums while other boingy-boingy instruments puke all over it, all over the whole show. That’s called synesthesia. Gentle lectures, dangerous storytime, eerie fast-and-slow nightmare riffs, and a taut, bound-and-gagged rhythm section. Boingily-boingily, that’s phantasmagoria. That’s the Uranium Club’s latest album, “The Cosmo Cleaners.” So swish around some mouthwash and plug in your AirPods, kid, it’s time to drop that needle!