This is rocking my world at the moment, even better than the previous album. Went to see them play a few months back and my ears are still ringing.
Southern Records Blurb Wrote:
Right from the get go Comes To Your House attacks like a kill-hungry bear. Spinning in circles, eyes turned up in its head. TODD have got songs about naughty girls in Berlin, they've got songs about prison fights with chairs, hell they've even got a song about stabbing a dog to death!! HAAAA HAAAAAAA!!!! (Please note... no real animals were harmed in the making of this record) that's right, and it's a true story bub, lyrics written and sung by the one and only Eugene Robinson from OXBOW. TODD kindly provide a suitable backdrop of black hell-noise riffage for this little ditty. After that things get weird, really fucking weird. As soon as you think you've pinned this bitch down as some kind of stoner/noise record they go all fuckin Pussy Galore meets Devo! How is that possible you ask? Fuck knows--just listen to the goddamned thing!! Things then take another bizarre twist in the form of a song called "Council Member". The song bursts off the starting line like a drag racer on fire and within seconds it's gone, only to be replaced by what sounds like like 20 scissors?
Yeah, 20 scissors. Snipping away, but why? and it just keeps going ad infinitum, until... BOOM!!! here comes some shit that kind of moves into that repetitive Load Records type territory. After that, Oh Jesus, it's all over the place. You get a tiny little casio toy keyboard that somehow manages to sound like a building falling over. You get some crazy Japanese chicks rambling about fuck knows what over the top of ridiculous ear splitting high end skree, that is so painful you'll feel personally violated, and you get sludge so thick you feel like you just ate an entire jar of family sized extra crunchy peanut butter.
Bio Wrote:
TODD, London's most primal chaotic rock unit, return this year with their gnarliest fruit yet! Comes To Your House - a pressurised can of unruly jams, rhythmic freakouts and floored mixer estrangement. But where are they coming from? Man they have one sick story!
Craig Clouse (pictured with the twins) is a Texan in London. He has a history of making anti-social noise Stateside, playing in legendary Austin, Texas hardcore band Crown Roast and before embarking on stints with Negative Step and Amphetamine Reptile's hardcore saviours Hammerhead. After relocating to London he assembled Todd as result of a 4AD request to support The Breeders at a "secret" show in between their two 2002 All Tomorrow's Parties appearances. Playing in a packed venue, they made quite an impression, which led to many fantastic shows to follow, including SXSW Festival (Austin, Texas) in March 2003 and 2004, as well as a return to All Tomorrow's Parties (Camber Sands, UK) the very same month. Their debut release, a 5-song EP on Loose Lips Sink Ships (2002), earned them a 5K review in Kerrang. It wasn't long before Southern Records fell in love with the carnage and signed em up like lightning. TODD's debut full length Purity Pledge was released by Southern Records in 2004 to much critical praise, they got the cover of premier Underground music magazine Loose Lips Sink Ships, Mojo called them a "fire-breathing colossus of sardonic, twisted metal". Kerrang compared the album to In Utero, drawing similarities between the "lean, acrid power" of both albums. Q meanwhile preferred to get Biblical on the band comparing them to Samson "pulling the house down to prove a valid musical point". Uncut loved the "loud, ugly and unremmitingly heavy" nature of the album, with Rock Sound proclaiming that "TODD can rock seven fucking bells out of almost anyone", that certainly included Terrorizer journo Ben Crudgington who for me summed it all up:
"Purity Pledge is a fuzzing, crushing beast of an album. This power is nothing but incredibly enhanced by their live show."
Since the album was released, the band took to touring the UK and Europe, playing a vast array of incendiary gigs, often ending in unceremonious chaos, it was during a recent jaunt to Europe that they met new guitarist Lucky The Horse in a brothel in Vienna (less is more). Since then, the band have concentrated their efforts on finishing new album Comes To Your House, and let me tell you it doesn't dissapoint. Yes, the riffs are still present, and yes CTYH is one helluva heavy beast, but this new album has the fuck cranked to 11 and the `what the hell?' in the red. It's startling blast of life from one of the most exciting and deranged acts out there. But you can judge that for yourselves as the band are now planning on coming to you town, it ain't rubbernecking if the accident is on purpose. A UK and European tour are both in the works for August this year!
Playlouder review Wrote:
Like Rodgers and Hammerstein deciphered by butt plugs, like The Osmonds' 'Crazy Horses' arsed on snakebite and shagging a cloven goat - thus ride London's bareback brutalists TODD. Ladies and gentlemen, you have been warned.
Peddling a livid, leaden inventory of Hammer Horror arias and terrifying flying saucer psalms, TODD's pummelling second full-length procession,'Comes To Your House', rolls out like an axe-strapped, doom-infused mini-series – in which the ghosts of Lightning Bolt, The Jesus Lizard and Butthole Surfers cavort over thirteen shades of varying aural and moral ruin.
'CTYH's themes progress from dodge sexual practices, ('Captain Vinegar'; 'Golden Rabbit'), to mounting social degeneracy, ('Chair Fight'; The Knife Whisperer'; 'A Killer Grows'), to eventual redemption, ('Christian St Christian'; 'Shepherdess').
Commencing with a momentary homage to seafaring musical theatre, ('Salty Old Queen'), TODD swiftly cajole us unto rather more apoplectic waters – the likes among which we'd expect to discover a rabble whose rampant Texan ex-pat commander, Craig Clouse, counts hardcore taskmasters Hammerhead and Crown Roast among his erstwhile disturbances. (He's also a sometime member of flamenco war fucks Shit and Shine).
Frenetically charting primal wig-outs, nihilistic riffage, cheerleader skree and frenzied sludge, TODD engender the heaviest, basest of rock spawn – and readily affirm their diabolic pedigree by drafting in Oxbow's coruscating cock-lobber Eugene Robinson, who serenades with late-night tales of repeatedly stabbing a rabid dog.
Yet TODD are not without incongruous respite: especially, and somewhat gloriously, on 'Council Member', in which forty ravens blessed with rusty secateurs for beaks encircle in an eerie, blade-clacking symphony. Which, naturally, later revolts into SICKENING NOISE.
When TODD come to your house, throw open your windows, throw open your doors, throw open your arms. But lock up yr whores, and hang up yr fears. They'll melt your ears, your arse, your heart.
