Artist: Yuppie Club
Title: Pretty Insane
Type: Album
Label: Finest Noise

Well, I don’t know about you, but I do enjoy a good mystery. Yuppie Club are a German four piece, who hide behind masks while producing their feral brand of thrash inflected grindcore. The nature of this puzzling conundrum? Well, on their myspace page, they proudly proclaim that three of the crew used to be in a successful thrash band, fifteen years ago. I’m really none the wiser after listening to the album, but it did slightly add an air of Scooby-Doo styled puzzle solving to the proceedings!

Pretty Insane is a fun romp through extreme metal the way that metal used to be made. Yuppie Club don’t fasten themselves down with anything as troublesome as genre conventions. You’ll find (old) hardcore drum beats, rapid-fire thrash riffing and insane grind tempos all thrown into the pot, often within the context of a single song. As with all things grindcore, this can be a hit and miss affair, but by and large Yuppie Club are hitting the target with their oblique takes on the grind style. The sub-human vocals lend an air of menace to the music here, with vocalist …erm…”Lee” having a satisfyingly old school timbre to his delivery. While we’re on the subject of names, “Bill” (guitars), “Ken” (drums) and “Jeff” (bass) are probably nothing more than the Carcass of their real names. Clad in their trademark suits and Halloween / Michael Myers styled disguises, I can only imagine that this lot are a blast live – in every sense of the word.

It’s not all good news, alas. The scatter-gun approach to song writing does lead to the occasional duffer-track, and the production isn’t so much as shoe-string than strung out, with a hollow, cheap drum sound and slightly anaemic guitar sound. The collision of Repulsion and crossover thrash works for the majority of the time, but it often sounds like the band would definitely benefit from more time in the studio refining some of the musical ideas and the afore mentioned beefy production. A particularly downtuned (and borderline mental) version of the classic “Exhume to Consume” lurks at the end of the album, like the stalker in a teen slasher film, only twice as nasty. A winner then? More of an entertaining score draw, but fun in an off-the-wall, flawed but well meaning way.

http://www.myspace.com/yuppieclub

Chris Davison

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