aaamusic | On 29, Mar 2011

Vertical Smile marks the debut of Youth as front man after over 30 years as titanic bassman with bands including Killing Joke and Brilliant, and over two decades as one of the UK’s foremost producers. Described by Youth as, “the band I should have done but didn’t do when I was 16, before getting serious with Killing Joke,” Vertical Smile’s titter-inducing tag cloaks a force ten barrage of behemoth gutter action, post-punk electronic groove marauding and often personal, hard-hitting lyrics marking the first time the bassist has stepped up to the microphone with stories to impart.

Youth has obviously been more than a little goosed by his past exploits playing bass alongside 80s sleaze god Zodiac Mindwarp and providing the rumble to Jaz Coleman’s Valkyrie siren flights, but also gleefully runs wild in the madly-diverse sonic field which he straddles with effortless ease, musical barriers crumbling beneath his feet as future-disco grooves are raided by guitar napalm squads, crucially and sometimes remarkably imbued by the spirit of the blues. As with many seismic musical eruptions, Youth’s creative lava and onstage reinvention was fertilised by a desire to take DJing in a direction beyond the latest laptop programme.

He describes his metamorphosis into hotwired front man, “I started Vertical Smile about three years ago when I was asked to DJ at a Hellraiser club night. I was bored with the DJ format and confidently suggested I do a live rhythm section with myself on bass and new studio assistant David Nock on drums, playing heavy dance floor rhythms with dub and punk-funk bass lines. It went down really well and, although mainly instrumental, had the crowd rocking. This quickly developed into an expanded line-up with Freelance Hellraiser on keyboards and samplers, James Sedwards on guitars and Andrew Robertson on guitar and keys, with myself taking lead vocals ands writing songs over the dancefloor rhythms. Because of my limited vocal abilities these songs had to be simple and energetic”!

“We then played many gigs on other people’s lineups, a lot in Shoreditch, cutting our teeth playing to young audiences who didn’t have a clue who we were but would end up storming the stage. It’s really an extension of what we started back in Brilliant days; it’s now a floating lineup and possibly the closest I have got to doing a solo project, as I’m writing all the lyrics and melodies and fronting a band for the first time. The influences are post punk, EBM, Krautrock, P-Funk, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and psychedelic Detroit blues. Re-uniting with Killing Joke has given me a new-found confidence and front to lead a band for the first time. Also, after having produced so many singers from behind the glass, I thought it was probably a good time to step over to the other side, walk my talk and do what I had been encouraging many others to do.”

Vertical Smile’s riotous debut album, Sex, Dugs & Leisure ranks as one of the year’s most supercharged, provocative rock albums, more than living up to the promise of their recent EP, trailering the mothership album with the apocalyptic funk beast of ‘Explode!‘ with its air-punching ‘lose control’ clarion call hook; the demon-voiced stealth-electro of ‘Blacklight’ strafed by coruscating guitar savagery; ‘Automatic Freq’s acid-disco furore checking Parliament’s ‘Tear the Roof Off The Sucker’ and introducing MC5 guru John Sinclair and finally the album’s tour de force, ‘When We Were Young’, hinting at the full song as a jagged Flesh Robot remix.

Talking there, Youth does his vocal abilities an injustice; his emotive reflections during the afore-mentioned ‘When We Were Young’ are marinated in a relentless life spent pursuing music’s magical essence, whatever genre or form it may lie in, leading off with a spirited, ‘I love you, I hate you, but your hearts not in it’, before diving into its balls-out, full-throttle tear-up finale. The chorus is another pure pop diamond in the glam tradition, the racey groove propelled by explosive drumming and an energy level which seems to up gear, with momentum accelerating like a rampant bison’s erection, ending in tumultuous climax.

The Nirvana influence manifests in the malevolent riffage of ‘Shake It’ which they’re not afraid to amp up to wider screen proportions on tracks such as the hectic bombast of ‘Spite Machine’. One moment Youth seems to be exorcising himself of clutching demons, the next indulging in the eternal glory of gutter fun and monstrous racket. This group is not afraid of unholy noise but equally as adept at using Mr Hellraiser’s electronic forays where machines are pulled like udders and squirt acid grooves and electro sauce into the carnage. For instance, ‘What You Want’ slinks on a sleazy circuit grind but the big chorus could fill God’s toilet. Anyone aware of Youth’s long-time musical obsessions will be aroused and delighted to encounter his bass to the fore on the railing electro-disco of ‘You’re Never Satisfied’, the kind of bulging dancefloor statement stroked and salivated over by 80s greats like Larry Levan – which returns to the original point that Youth has original punk attitude, extreme emotional siphoning and the reckless sonic architecture of post-disco groove music so embedded in his soul that it was only inevitable that, under the right circumstances and in the right group, it would finally ejaculate into the face of the world, like Satan’s penis in an unexpected rabbit grotto. More earth-bound, Sex, Drugs & Leisure is the kind of album which maintains a long tradition started in the blues, threading through all great guitar based music of the last 80 years, from blues to punk to Gun Club rampage to Grinderman, but abducting electronic dance music in its wake. Or as Youth puts it, “I love the anarchy in Vertical Smile, combined with some ferocious musical talents. It’s great when it comes out of the chase into a really tight repetitive riff. It’s great fun.”