Album Review: Saint Agnes – Welcome To Silvertown

Hello Kitty!

Welcome listeners, and let’s indulge in a little hey diddle diddle, the kitty without the fiddle, but instead wielding a seismic set of power tools for an impromptu  lesson in anatomisation.

The cover art reminds me of  Skin ‘n Bones and Pretty Boy Floyd, with those boots any puss would be glad to parade around in.

Silvertown is where it’s at my friends and therein reside Saint Agnes, a cut- throat, razor sharp, fight them if you dare bunch of ruffians. Being the coward that I am, I will quite happily listen to this record they have produced and tell you all about it. I taste a little Dogs D’Amour, The Cult, and even a little Nasty Suicide.

“Luck is a lady, try not to kill her” from the title track opens the wound a little wider and deeper as you let them tool up and poke around your vitals. The keyboards on “Move Like A Ghost” are quite the techno-funk-punk groove, deliciously fruity too! They kick back in at 2.00, yum!

“I hear your bones creaking” screeches our Kitty, as the ghosts slink and slide their way around your very being. Echoes of the dead and undead, this is unabashed, car crashed and trashed, it’s neat whisky  all the way as we rasp and gurgle our way to oblivion, and these guys will be back, believe me.

Get your drums ready to ring in the witching hour as we hope to

“see me with all my power”.

The music at around the 2.40 mark hints at The Damned(my favourite, favourite, favourite…sigh) and Sanctum Sanctorum with its creepy, cobwebby, old mansion style feel.

We turn it up a notch or seven with “I know fury, I know rage” from I Feel Dangerous Around You, as we saddle up and ride a “Black Horse” as we discover that

“everything I thought was true, was wrong”

We are left hanging; wrapped and trapped in barbed wire, dangling by our fingertips, this is one crime scene we will choose not to leave, we will carve our names into the walls with messages of pain, cruelty, suffering for those who find us. Imagine their desperation, their bewilderment, their resignation that songs of this calibre will leave- not a mark- but a crater.

Still refusing to die, as “the ghost of you still walks beside me” it is time for the light a candle ballad “Heart Of Mine”. It is forgivingly unforgiving, the soundtrack to a bar room brawl, the blues with a gun to your head and everything on the line, but the returns on this are infinite.

Oh, the agony and the ecstasy, sweet Diablo, take me home.

Cue, Pete Murphy ,”it cuts you up”……

Saint Agnes – Welcome To Silvertown out 3rd May via Death Or Glory Gang Records.