Part Chimp

★★★★ Drool WRONG SPEED. CD/DL/LP

Cheeky London sludgerockers run gamut of overamplification.

Formed from the ashes of ’90s rowdies Ligament and Scarfo, this ribaldly christened ensemble led by fret-mangler Tim Cedar and skin-pounder Jon Hamilton have very seriously brought the noise for two decades now. Their fifth excursion opens at ampson-11, fusing post-hardcore with doom-metal (think Dinosaur Jr. covering Electric Wizard) and only gets louder from there on. Given Cedar’s long-running sideline as house producer/engineer at Camberwell’s Dropout Studio, ’Chimp’s max-volume immersion is always expertly realised on record. Here, One In The Eye matches primetime Loop’s bone-splintering thrust, while Clever remaps The Jesus And Mary Chain’s lurch through Syd Barrett’s Vegetable Man with a strutting, Kiss-like momentum. When ex-Hey Colossus vocalist Tim Farthing arrives on It’s True, Man to supersub Cedar’s reedier imprecations with a gargling growl (about a Yuletide LSD binge, apparently), we’re in the very filthiest neighbourhood of post-hardcore ultra-nasties like Killdozer and Cows. For the listener’s every earbleeding requirement, Drool summarily delivers. from the previous hit and miss reunited albums, the younger Finns dragging Dad towards a far looser sound than any Beatles-loving 62-year-old songwriter might hope for. Ironically, Dreamers Are Waiting is possibly the most Crowded House-sounding album Crowded House have made since their Crowded House debut.