No Ceremony/// - Heartbreakers

No Ceremony/// are a mysterious bunch. Or, No Ceremony/// (yeah, the forward slashes are part of the name) is a mysterious person; that’s how little we know about this Mancunian act. What we do know is that the opening few seconds of their second single, ‘Heartbreaker’, with its sampled kick-drum and throbbing synths, sounds a lot like a section of the Gossip’s ‘Standing In The Way Of Control’.

After that? Things get a little more interesting. On top of that groundwork they add some doom-laden piano, an over driven guitar screeching all over the place, and a couple of voices making like Haunted House spooks.

When it works, it works well: all that industrial noise coalesces into some ghoulishly fun elecro-pop. The vocals, richly soaked in auto-tune which, add to the industrial, mechanical feel of it all. ‘Heartbreaker’, in a way, sounds like a marriage between Nine Inch Nails’ darker, more debased sounds to their initial pop sensibilities. Or, as some have said, they sound like Metallica if they had signed to Factory Records.

However, all the earnest spookiness does seem a bit phoney, and starts drags a little after a while (even more so on the B-side, ‘Breakinghearts’, essentially an extended 12’ remix). That said, if they swap the plastic spiders for something real, No Ceremony/// could manufacture a return of the dark heart of the Hacienda.