Creative Adult - Psychic Mess

If you were to make a list of what a perfect punk album ‘should’ sound like you could run through each constituent part of ‘Psychic Mess’ ticking the boxes without much doubt. However if the question asked was ‘Does Psychic Mess stand up as a perfect punk album?’, it’d take an almost dangerous level of kindness to suggest ‘yes’.

Realistically it’s committing the cardinal sin for an album of its type: it sounds studied but it doesn’t sound authentic. Mostly Creative Adult rely on just getting things right and grinding their way through - the album doesn’t seethe or writhe with tension, it’s not so loose it’s raw, nor so tight so it’s formidable. When Iceage released ‘New Brigade’,which is unfortunately way too recent for any competing punk act, it sounded like they were outside in your garden setting fire to your shed. That’s not to even delve as far back as Bauhaus and Killing Joke, who see themselves poorly approximated several times over on ‘Psychic Mess’, who dripped with an evil menace from the first note to the last. Creative Adult just sound like they’re spitting at the bus stop and trying to convince someone older to buy them the smallest, cheapest vodka.

Opening with ‘Control My Eyes’, the band set in motion a pattern that serves them faithfully throughout, a slightly heavy post-punk skeleton on which to hang moments of chaos and to support the blurry, slurred vocal. Marking itself as one of the album’s highlights second track, ‘Charismatic Leader’ pulls from its mildly trashy verses to create a soaring, tearing riff behind the chorus, while ‘Half Way’ adds a jaunty riff that strays weirdly close to Electric Six before resorting to getting a lot louder as a centrepiece.

All too often Creative Adult have the same relationship with making everything a bit noisier as M Night Shyamalan does with twists – all the instruments are played faster, are hit harder and there’s a sense that they’re just stood there with a mindset of “ooh what do you think of that now then?!”. It’s just another instance of them essentially taking a shortcut to fill a gap in content or direction or most importantly substance.

What’s really criminal is it sounds good. Without close inspection, without consistent rotation it does every bit as good a job at sounding fast and heavy as anyone could be expected to. It’s just hard to know what makes it Creative Adult and what, despite shouting so very loud, it wants to actually say.