The Chapman Family - All Fall

A piercing drone that cuts through the air with the urgency of a bullet is the first thing you’ll hear when you pop on The Chapman Family’s ‘All Fall’. It’s swiftly followed by the slam of a snare and the agitated line “These faces are cold… their eyes are open” delivered in a pleasingly mysterious baritone. By the ten second mark you’ll know that being pumped through your ears is the kind of angsty, macabre post-punk that would be the person, bathed in dark, staring at you from the corner all night long. Never blinking, never moving. And god is it magnificent.

By diving head first into the scuzzy bass, ‘All Fall’ never gives you a chance to even appreciate how twisted the lyrics are: “There’s glory and tension in violence” slithers Kingsley Chapman. But this isn’t a bad thing, musically this is the result of someone pumping Joy Division’s back catalogue with industrial strength steroids; the bass pounds away in the background, the drums are unfussy but clinical, the guitar adds a pleasingly manic ending to the preceding that rounds out the 2:41 rather nicely. The static hiss that it drones out on only provides you time to catch your breath.

Annoyingly, there’s very little to get to grips with here that we haven’t seen before. We get a great sense of the kind of violent aural attack that next year’s album will throw up, but The Chapman Family have served this up in previous releases. As it stands, this is a great single that should have the fans screaming with every drop of energy that they can muster, it looks like 2011 might just have its first essential band.