Tropical Fuck Storm

★★★★ Deep States JOYFUL NOISE.

CD/DL/LP

Third LP by Gareth Liddiard’s post-Drones project, and modern life is still rubbish. There are few artists better suited to essay this wild, paranoid era than Gareth Liddiard.

Deep States applies the bleak voice of his previous band Drones to a lurid landscape of internet conspiracy theories, rising fascism and global pandemics, swapping Drones’ charred punk/Crazy Horse hybrid for modernist experimental pop. The tone is fevered, fatalistic, Liddiard’s visions painted with the scattershot, satiric venom of Ralph Steadman, from Give A Fuck Fatigue’s parade of “deep fakes, false flags, fires and famines”, to Bumma Sanger’s litany of Covid-era woes. Beyond such vivid, often thrilling caricatures, however, the acrid smoulder of The Donkey, the mysterious haunt of Legal Ghost and the nuanced pop of New Romeo Agent (sung by keyboardist Erica Dunn) prove that Tropical Fuck Storm have yet to succumb to glib nihilism, and that tenderness and poetry are still within their grasp.