Kill Your Boyfriend: Voodoo – Album Review

Kill Your Boyfriend: Voodoo

(Sister 9/Little Cloud/Shyrec)

LP | CD | DL

Out now

Italy’s Kill Your Boyfriend return with an album that blends shoegaze, post-punk and no-wave to terrifying effect.

Kicking things off with The King, its clanging beat and wired dentist drill drone skating beneath the black mass vocals, it’s clear that the band are mining Suicide to great effect, blending that intensity with a heavy dose of dark shoegaze and finding space and time to drop in a psych riff that runs higher and higher under the track’s outro. It’s one hellbent opening statement before they drive headlong into The Man In Black. It pushes the post-punk of their sound more to the fore, twitching in an almost Jesus And Mary Chain groove, albeit one bound by shackles of psychosis. For anyone into bands like Vacant Lots, you’ll know exactly where Kill Your Boyfriend are coming from on Voodoo.

Where the album excels is in its ability to unite as one, the way it glides from The Man In Black into Mr Mojo exemplifies it perfectly. The same groove and tempo, the space between tracks almost like a break before they drop into something even more sinister, it really works to form the idea of the album as a continuous sonic journey. By this point, they are tapping into something primordial, an inner struggle, the chaotic id beyond control as they are dragged by pure instinct.

It further intensifies on Buster, a tribal beat propping up a droning bass that gives way to a hypnotic synth line. The Day The Music Died closes out the bastardised rock ‘n’ roll side of the album and, from there, they descend into something altogether darker, more psychedelic, incantations from a place unexplored. The two tracks that make up side two, Papa Legba and the title track, Voodoo, run together through dark incantations, calling you to slip into their darkness, and drift off on Charon’s boat.

On Voodoo, Kill Your Boyfriend have certainly crafted an album of two halves, one that, when taken together as a whole, conjures up a dread within that somehow hooks you into their world. Time seems to stand still on the second side, life passes you by without notice and the duo transfix you and hold you exactly where they want you to be.

Kill Your Boyfriend are online, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Bandcamp.

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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Nathan also presents From The Garage on Louder Than War Radio every Tuesday at 8pm. Tune in for an hour of fuzz-crunching garage rock ‘n’ roll and catch up on all shows on the From The Garage Mixcloud playlist.

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Source: louderthanwar.com