Those Fucking Snowflakes: Everything Absolutely Is Fkkkkkkd – album review

THOSE FUCKING SNOWFLAKES

Everything Is Absolutely Fkkkkkkd

Louder Than War Records

10″ | DL

Out 22nd January

Presale available now

Those Fucking Snowflakes return with a new EP and turn their blend of hardcore post-punk math rock squarely once again on our current society.

It was always a curious state when the alt-right commentators and their blinkered acolytes adopted the ‘snowflake’ insult, the idea that it was taken from one of the finest contemporary literary takedowns of the fragility of modern masculinity completely missed by them in favour of a blunt broadstroke. The snowflakes may have become an avalanche, but this Blackpool trio have owned the moniker like no other since their inception a couple of years back. A collection of EPs since then have taken a vitriolic aim at some of the architects of the current shitshow we are all living through. Never ones to mince their words, titles of songs on previous EPs made sure we knew exactly who was in their sights (Boris Johnson and The Big Red Bus of Bullshit being one fine example).

On their new EP, Everything Is Absolutely Fkkkkkked, they kick things off once again with a swipe at the current clown occupying 10 Downing Street. Uncooperative Crusties regains the flippant insult hurled at climate crisis activists by Johnson, possibly the country’s most incompetent PM, as he attended a celebration of one of the country’s most destructive PMs. “Boris has missed the point again.” revolve the lyrics as the outro swirls out of a dense battering of dark and pointed hard math rock. From there they drift into the spacious Due Some Terrible End, the song with which the band announced the EP release. With its at times Hooky-style basslines wrapping themselves around the crashing distortion, brief respites allowing moments to breath, the song shudders and rises up through the thick smoke of its own making.

White Isn’t Right pummels its message through chaos and anger before By The Power Of Bernard Castle opens up the density once again. Addressing the fact that, to the elite in power, we are merely the fodder to the swept out to keep the machinery that lines their pockets moving, the song is a call to arms against the further corruption of the country in light of the global pandemic still gripping society. “We’re disposable. Should we be so surprised they’ve been trying to keep us back all this time?” They make the rules through which to keep one iron heel over us while we try to navigate, escape, survive.

They hammer that message home more on the directly-titled Caudrilla Can Fuck Right Off. They really can. “It’s death repeating.” As we strive for growth in a society led by donkeys who can see no further than the trough of caviar at the ends of their noses, the distorted chugging chaos collapses into the message of the EP. “We’re fucked.” It’s the desolation and powerlessness felt by many as their communities are pillaged, magnified through the lenses of a lockdown. Not all is lost though and, as history has always shown us, when the masses come together to rise up against intolerance and inequality, only then are true steps made towards bettering the world. And that’s where the band leave us on their final song, Mendacious Meddling Milkshake Recipient.

As the last decade has seen the rise of the sad clown leading the masses in a choreographed dance to a tune played by Murdoch’s string puppets of pied pipers, astroturf acolytes have risen up, rejected by those that should be leading and finding solace and message in the backwards views of opportunistic jingoists. Who knew that they would be so lactose intolerant? The final song on the EP, a glorious attack on Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is probably the highlight of an already strong release. It’s on this song where the ideas really come together. The lyrics are pushed more to the front, the music behind them a torrential whirlwind of crashing riffs and pounding rhythm. It lets up briefly to allow the message to be hammered home before spinning out in a fast-forward attack on one of the chief charlatans of modern-symbolic racism.

On Everything Is Absolutely Fkkkkkked, Those Fucking Snowflakes once again pull no punches and let rip with all they’ve got. It’s no scattergun approach, but rather a well-aimed shot at some of the architects of society’s ills.

Find Those Fucking Snowflakes on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and the band’s website.

Everything Is Abolutely Fkkkkkked is available now from Bandcamp.

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All words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Source: louderthanwar.com