The Critic

Mother-In-Law: Winklepicker

The latest offering from the iconoclastic yet impenetrable Japanese collective is reviewed by Onan The Barbarian.

Following a brief hiatus during which it is suspected that the dictatorial frontperson known solely as Leg had received their first neural implant, Mother-In-Law return with a coruscating statement of intent.

Wrought from the inchoate tropes littered on the alluvial plains of mere human longing, this stunning collection surpasses even the proto-mechanistic effusions of previous touchstone, ‘Vacuum Cleaner’.

From the opening seconds, the committed listener realises they are in for a challenging ride into the innermost workings of a diseased mind, although the affliction is surely to be celebrated. For the first 15 minutes we are plunged into the hectic milieu of ‘Shibuya Crossing’, which we are invited to experience as a yet-to-be-weaned infant of limited vocabulary. Indeed, some may think that all they are hearing is a quarter of an hour of a small child screaming unbearably, but this is to overlook the visionary intent of Leg et al.

At this point some background: Mother-In-Law started as stablemates of near-contemporaries The Boredoms, famed for long sets featuring frantic multiple drummers overlaid with deeply offensive synthesisers and anguished screams. Famously Leg has dismissed them as ‘an overly-sentimental rock’. Once Leg had cleaved to the tenets of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the infamous Teutonic composer of the early 20th century, famed for such pieces as Herbstmusic, in which nails of varying lengths are hammered into wood. However they now dismissed these efforts as the bourgeois doodlings of a decadent and feeble, if not actually second-class mind.

Following the palate-cleansing of the opening piece, we are subject to a dazzling parade of artistic triumphs: ‘Bishop’ which could be mistaken for a clandestine recording of a small egomaniac frantically masturbating over the entirety of Taylor Swift’s catalogue, ‘Palindrome’ which it is suggested should only be played backwards, and ‘Austin Allegro’ in which the Haynes manual for that gratefully forgotten work of automotive grotesquerie is minutely eviscerated in a generic office shredder of indeterminate provenance.

At this point it behooves your humble scribe to confess to being so overcome with weltschmerz that only his sense of schadenfreude and commitment to the zeitgeist enabled the continued exploration of this definitive weltanschauung.

The first fifteen hours represent an absolute pinnacle of human creativity, casting into serious doubt the previous claims of the likes of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Botticelli’s Birth Of Venus, or even Toploader’s seminal opus ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’. The latter three-quarters could be profitably viewed as a gentle descent from that vertiginous peak, indistinguishable as it is from 45 hours of listening to someone tap on their phone keyboard.

Winklepicker is available as a neural implant or a collection of baseball cards, wherein depictions of American sporting giants have been viciously excised and replaced with a series of haikus which create in the mind of the audient the possibility that they have experienced the ‘album’.

This is surely the soundtrack for the age; of reason, there is none.