Don’t Look It In The Eye – EP Review

TWAT UNION: Don’t Look It In The Eye EP                  

Alcopop! Records

CD / Streaming / Download

Out Now

Seen as one of The Guardians One To Watch after one song, TWAT UNION are about to head out on a UK tour on the eve of this EP’s release. With that sort of hype, can the band remain calm under pressure? MK Bennett says very much so.

The inaugural Theatre Workers And Television Union have convened its members on this auspicious day, comrades, to gift us the bare-faced wonder of this collection of short, sharp shocks wrapped in a bow of indeterminate colour.

If it is true that a band can be judged on a) The excellence of their drummer and b) Their song titles, then TWAT UNION have absolutely nothing to worry about, the drumming is fabulous, and the titles are immaculate. Don’t Look It In The Eye, which possibly relates to hazardous chemicals or sewage works, is glorious, full of wit and wrapped in sarcastic joy, lyrically and musically more sophisticated than the surface appearance might suggest.

Humour has been used to make serious points in art, from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to Hannah Gadsby to Tig Notaro; distraction serves as a sugared pill that otherwise can be difficult to swallow. So, while current politics descends into the dark ages of backwards Christianity and right-wing grifting, a shield of necessity is required for safety and mental health reasons, given the right’s inability to recognise satire or even pronounce’ twat’ correctly. The mask of making a serious point often only requires a little critical theory to unravel.

You could, for instance, easily get very academic about the idea of manufacturing a Little Pink Drill and its relation to societal expectations. The opening song of the EP, wherein lyrically they examine the metaphors around drilling and doing it yourself, especially when they ape dadrock godhead Van Halen with the drill-based guitar solo. The harmonised vocal intro, the very first thing you hear, sets out the stall of disguised brilliance with its technical mastery, briefly Oh Brother, Where Art Thou before heading back up the King’s Road, safely back in the arms of punk/Riot Grrrl. A great opener that sets out their various stalls, a staccato riff with the intro repeated as the chorus, a blast of feminist energy, full of hooks and impossible to forget.

Singer Of The Band shares a broad alignment with a similar and equally excellent song by the Lambrini Girls, which would make an exceptional tour, tells the familiar tale of the disrespect shown to female musicians, patronised and passive-aggressively shat on for daring to be more than window dressing, 80 plus years after Sister Rosetta Tharpe stepped out on a stage and reinvented the guitar. X-Ray Spex and The Stooges come to mind here, not least for the unexpected but welcome and all too brief sax solo, an upbeat stomper with an on-fire rhythm section and another magnificent riff.

Red Flag acts as the centrepiece of the EP, a list of familiar complaints from men who either don’t know or care how their words affect others, the traditional toxic narrative of demand and outdated assumption that bears no relation to cultural evolution; it weighs heavily on the oppressed but rarely the oppressors.
Take the beautifully veiled but poignant.

“An ex threw a vase at my head, and I don’t know why
You need to control your emotions, I hate it when you cry
It makes me feel bad..”

from Red Flag, reflecting the deliberate, pointed, and marketed confusion surrounding modern masculinity, sold to boys as tradition, resulting in the patriarchal clusterfuck we find ourselves in, with only misogyny as the end result. On the upside, the song is perfect, a rolling, discordant track of mid-paced subtlety and deft touches, with particular mention for the keyboard hook that sits between the verses. Majestic and already a leap in writing terms from just two songs back, or at least excellent sequencing. A nice ‘by the way’ to end, too.

Danger Boob is ostensibly a song about office politics and power dynamics, a wry look at objectification with the narrator in charge, three minutes of post-punk power-pop with another great keyboard performance, a melancholic melody that manages to soar and remain relatable simultaneously.

The final song and original first single, UTI, is a handy microcosm of the band’s world, darkly comic and deeply universal, a lyric of seething poetic annoyance and the general lack of fairness in sexual exchange, it is both meaningful and funny, not the easiest lyrical line to walk.

“You and I made a UTI
But it’s I that’s got it
And U feel fine
Let’s dot the i’s
And cross the t’s
We were an Us, but there is no We..”

Matched with a feral and porcelain-based video, UTI is a summation and a call to arms, a contradiction as all bands must be in the currently unsustainable musical business model, but everything about them, from the songs to the knowingly theatrical aesthetic shouts stop, look and listen, and follow the context, because context exists beyond all other things.

The future’s bright, the future’s twat.

TWAT UNION’s Instagram | Facebook | Website

All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram

Also, listen to Louder Than War’s Iain Key chat to Twat Union on this show.