This came in over the transom a while back and today it’s released to a waiting world, just in time for the General Election in the UK. The Twistettes are a powerful Scots sister duo [Nicky D’Arc on drums and Jo D’arc on bass/vocals] that take the guitar + drums duo format down to an even more primal level by being a bass and drums duo! And did I mention that the bass is fuzzed out to within an inch of its life?

The sound takes the Riot Grrrl template [and being Scots, adds a few more Rs into it!] and uses the form like a cudgel to attack the many impediments of a just and egalitarian society that, generally speaking, are intrinsic to a Tory government such as the UK has had for 14 years now. We generally shy away from salty vulgarity here at PPM but when your government is an obscenity it’s not time to mince words, and their blistering new single, “Tory C•••s” is hardly a shrinking violet in that regard!

It began with six seconds of low-level feedback, and the all hell broke loose as the song exploded on the one with a torrent of primal rancor with the relentless, slamming drums and fuzztone bass making a pile-driver of force out the song as the duo wailed with splenetic rage. It’s the sort of Punk assault capable of knocking the wind out of you. Then the verses spelled everything out for us as Jo D’arc spat them out with a vigor bordering on the maniacal.

Then the piston-pumping music bed dropped out completely for the spoken-word middle eight that saw Jo move from anxiety to fully-blown panic as the feedback from the bass amp slowly grew in power to meet her levels of frenzy as she wailed “1984 is booting down my door…1984 has a battering ram, is a battering raaa-aaaa-aaaaa-aaam!!” As the savage pummeling continued in the climax to the song’s cold ending on a final “it’s a battering ram, it’s a battering ram!” It was 2:34 of paint peeling intensity that was on par with a song like “Fear In The Western World.”

The song is currently streaming at the usual places, but the band’s Bandcamp store doesn’t have the studio version of the single that we just reviewed, though it is in the iTunes store, So we might be ahead of digital distro today. Given that you really should be hearing this as soon as possible, here’s the live version that originally appeared on the band’s 2020 live lockdown album, “Live At Capture Works.”

I hope all of the UK readers of this blog will be blasting this one on the way to the polls on …July 4th [ironically, American Independence Day!]. I see that the UK now requires an ID to vote… all the better to depress turnout any way they can…just like many states in America now do. My own state of North Carolina will now require an ID to cast my vote for in our coming election in November. At least the Tories look like they are being set up like ninepins this election. Things are much grimmer over here and in France where repressive forces are on the roll to eliminate that meddlesome democracy any way they can. So don’t neglect to vote your conscience when its your turn.

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