Wishes, Horses, Beggars.
My contact at the hallowed offices of the PR company stakes her life on the debut record from Beggar, a quartet of cacophonous characters from London via Bristol are joining the mass of angry bands and pitching their tent at the festival of noise and nutcracking.
Hold my hand people, lets follow Daniel into the lion’s den.
We gather under the ‘Blood Moon’ and are transported back in time to the era of the classics like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. It is a rejuvenation of the heavy, concrete slab structured beats of old, imagine pushing a steam roller up a hill, grinding, machine-like, but worth the effort. An ‘Anaesthete’ is a person who has been given an anaesthetic, there you see you learn something new every day, which is quite staggering when you hear the punch your lights out finish to this track. When ‘ The Cadaver Speaks’ make sure you are all ears, the words will charge at you like a demented knife-thrower losing his grip on his cutlery. Neat riffery at 1.07 and again at 2.34 in ‘Black Cloud’ adds to the sensation of scraping a cheese grater over your skin, painful but highly enjoyable. Singer Charlie Davis has the shouty vocals you are already familiar with, and his cohorts provide adequate support with their rage-filled musicianship.
‘Custody Of The Eyes’ is twenty-our seconds of bliss, just a little stop gap folks and then off to locate ‘Tenantless The Graves’, which can mean only one thing, it’s the walking dead.
We get a little Russian now with ‘Matryoshka Brain’, which refers to the Babushka dolls that sit one inside the other, matryoshka being Russian for ‘little matron’ and you can stop your sniggering, we are not in a Carry On movie.
‘Compelled To Repeat’ is the grand finale and also the title song and it tells of our habitual and repetitive living, one that we perpetuate regardless, we revisit situations that have been harmful, and instead of repairing the hurt, we nurture it like an endangered species.
Riffs that can deafen at ten paces, my friends, if it’s beggar by you, it’s beggar than me.
Beggar – Compelled To Repeat out 3rd April via APF Records.