Uranium Club

Minneapolis’ Uranium Club has been holding down a spot at the top of the punk pantheon these past few years, and with a new entry into their catalog, the band looks far from shaking their hold on the top rungs. In the past the Club has found themselves as caustic as any tin foil chewers — evoking Pere Ubu and Mx-80 — pushing aside hooks for barbed wire windmills of sound that lacerate the listener. On their latest, like Wire, Magazine, or The Saints before them, the band excels in not holding tightly to their sound, but rather letting evolution tumble their turbulence into gems. The Saints in particular come into play as the band embraces an unlikely nest of brass on a few tracks, letting a bit of flash shine off of their tangled tin wonderland.

The record still gets its slices in, but the band has far expanded its vision from their first couple of releases. A running narrative throughout the album finds the band mixing spaced synths with spoken word pieces that feel more akin to Belbury Poly or Giles, Giles, and Fripp than any of the band’s punk precursors. With Infants Under The Bulb, Uranium Club enter themselves clearly into the prog-punk lineage, a narrow slice if there ever was one, littered with the detritus of The Embarrassment and Refused alike. The band’s been building to a record like this and they embrace it rightfully. Brash, bruised, acerbic, and ebullient, Uranium Club proves that the smartest bands in the room can cook as much as they can cut.

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