WORLD RECORD

I've only just caught up with VDGG's back catalogue so this album was new to me. Given the sheer quality of this group's work on the five previous albums, from The Least We Can Do through to Still Life, I can only assume the second side of this one is some kind of wind up. The one thing the five predecessor albums all had going for them was a relentless sense of purpose that left the listener pretty much exhausted. This time I didn't feel any sense of purpose at all. The only song on the album that came anywhere near that effect was Masks. For the rest, the only thing that risked exhaustion was my patience. Maybe if they'd replaced the last ten minutes of Meurglys with a thunderer like La Rossa, the album might conceivably have crept into my collection, but as it is there's no chance.

Look, I can understand a band wanting to evolve, but normally bands evolve out of, not into, four kids jamming in a garage. Maybe this was the album that convinced them they couldn't in fact evolve, so they called it a day. That's fine by me. I'm happy and grateful to them for laying down five of the finest albums ever to grace the record stores and I'll politely overlook World's End - wow, that's a genuine Freudian slip.