Therapy? - Crooked Timber

Crooked Timber

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1. The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself
2. Enjoy The Struggle
3. Clowns Galore
4. Exiles
5. Crooked Timber
6. I Told You I Was Ill
7. Somnambulist
9. Magic Mountain
10. Bad Excuse For Daylight


While ASIWYFA, General Fiasco, Panama Kings and others are bringing a wave of optimism and freshness to the NI music scene, veteran rockers Therapy? have been churning out hook laden rock n roll for nearly twenty years now. Normally a band that's been under the radar for a while suddenly bringing out a new album in a midst of cool kids spells a certain ominous embarassment, an imminent realisation that they're clawing to remain relevant. Therapy?, however, aren't over complicating things on their latest, or discovering God (lol?). Instead they've kept things relatively simple, catchy as fook rock songs with meaty norn irish vocals.

The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself is exactly what you expect upon seeing the title; a sort of theme tune to insanity - Agitated riffs and vocals marching all the way into the asylum. It'll get under your skin after just a few listens and you'll be grinding your teeth to it in no time.
Enjoy The Struggle shows LaFaro just how snarly northern irish crunk should be done. A greasy bassline and hyperactive drums pave the way for Andy Cairns' rough n ready vocals, and again another arrogant riff that will sink into your cranium in no time.

Listening to album highlight Clowns Galore's riff is like being repeatedly pummeled in the ribcage by Joe Calzaghe (probably). You get the shite beaten out of you, but it's certainly an experience, and "Give the circus a break/It makes us happy" is probably going to be stuck in your head for quite some time.

Exiles shamelessly goes for a dirty main riff, and aims to have you humming it's chorus for the next few weeks. It's maybe a tad predictable, but it's pretty fuckin good, and it thankfully slows the pace down in Crooked Timber a tad.
Title track Crooked Timber shows Therapy? mixing things up, slightly. The vocals are less bulldog, more jack russell. Pinched harmonics make way for a riff that develops slowly and purposefully throughout the song, before we get a cheeky breakdown for the fans. "Times attrition, grinds these landscapes, sifts them into shape/My resistance, to its' pressure, buckles more each day." It's less guns blazing than the rest of the album, but manages to go out with venom, "My train will come for you" is delivered with suitable snarl.

The album blazes on satisfyingly enough, I Told You I Was Ill gives us some emotion from Cairns instead of the usual confident howl, as well as getting in an odd reference to Spike Milligan's gravestone.
Magic Mountain, a 10 minute long instrumental, (haha, yes, i'm home) looks terrible on paper. An ageing rock band bringing out a new album after a while......featuring an instrumental track around the same time as another instrumental band are making a name for themselves?
It works, though. With Crooked Timber being a bit, fuck you, Magic Mountain is more like, yeah, let's have a cup of tea. It's in the same vein as that Life In Technicolour number from Coldsplat's latest. Very optimistic, and pretty lovely to listen to. I have never listened to Therapy? before this, so I don't know if it's in keeping with their sound, i'm pretty sure it's not, but it's simply really nice. The ten minutes will fly in wonderfully.
Bad Excuse For Daylight is alright, but it's a bit like when you're writing the conclusion for an essay, you've blown off a night out to finish it, you've spent several hours on it already, and all you want to do is get it in the bag and not ever have to think about sociological methods ever again. It's not bad, but it seems a slight rushed ending.

Crooked Timber is pretty good. It's a shame not more of a fuss was made about this, or the press didn't make more of a song and dance over it, it's really good. It might have been enough to convince LaFaro that a handful of songs is not going to keep us going forever, and they're not the only ones going in for this hard rock malarky. If you're one of those people that cringe a wee bit when they hear a northern irish vocal, this probably isn't going to change your mind, and if you're not, well Crooked Timber probably isn't going to change your life either. It would be a damn shame, though, to let this album go under the radar.

Fire it up.

8.2/10