We’ve known Monkey Puzzle for a good few years, since we featured them as Band of the Day in 2015, then saw them supporting Psychostick in 2016. We liked them so much they ended up opening our stage on the Sunday at Wildfire the following year.
Scum is typically angry and shouty, much along the lines of the band’s wonderfully-entitled debut Suck Macaque. They’re bound to be a bit annoyed as they’d taken a break with plans to hit the stage again in 2020 when suddenly people started catching the cold or something and everything had to be shelved.
A quick description of their sound? Well, imagine Limp Bizkit had been raised in the Gorbals and developed an actual sense of humour to deal with the day to day issues of being robbed by heroin-addicted rats, and you’re probably in the ballpark. This is some vicious, catchy, well-crafted rap metal and the production is a step up from their earlier release as well.
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While still maintaining the nicely low-brow humour and attitude to life (the EP opens with a lovely drawn-out vomit before “Sick” kicks in), the quartet seemed to have matured in terms of ability and material. Slightly. Enough that their songs aren’t samey, but are still wildly enjoyable.
Seriously, wrap your ears around “Wurmz” and tell me that it wouldn’t have a crowd bouncing and moshing simultaneously like a metal tub of the titular (almost) wrigglies being held over an open flame.
As well as this and the equally mad “Killjester”, the band show a darker and heavier side with “Chuck Johnson”. More downbeat but every bit as heavy as their other material, this is a hair-on-the-neck raising sidestep for Monkey Puzzle and it works wonderfully well.
You can check out “Crushbra” below, which is probably the most similar to their older material and, despite being wall-to-wall superb, somehow manages not to be the best song on Scum.
2020 was meant to be “The Year Of The Monkey”. With the delayed EP release and a couple of weeks of 2021 remaining for people to grab a copy it, perhaps 2022 will get the band the recognition they richly deserve.
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Scum is out on December 17th
Check out all the bands we review in 2021 on our Spotify and YouTube playlists!
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